Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000 09:07:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Paul O Bartlett To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Advanced DOS for Beginners (was: Re: How to unsubscribe) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X-PGP-keyid: 0xF383C8F9 X-PGP-fingerprint: E62D2E2C7BCD08CB B742A93726A91532 Organization: SmartNet Private Account MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: opendos AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Sat, 8 Jul 2000, Glenn McCorkle wrote: > On Sat, 8 Jul 2000 19:07:09 -0400 (EDT), Paul O Bartlett wrote: > > > > > On this list I read [etc.] > > Figurativly speaking, is there any hope for a klutz like me, or am > > I trapped in Windowdom? > > So, you'de like to run DOS??? > No problem. :-) > You have W98 on that machine??? > You *have* MSDOS v7.something on that machine. > [etc.] Thanks very much for the response. However, I had a little more in mind. I *did* manage to use MS-DOS somewhat effectively -- which is part of my whole point -- and it seems that with MS-DOS 7 as a grudging sop to the masses, I would not have that same effectiveness. For example, I was able to use CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT somewhat to my advantage. In the config, I always set up a ramdisk, even on my old 5MB machine, so I could load very frequently used editors and utilities in it for faster startup. COMAND.COM has always left something to be desired, so I used SHELL= to used NDOS from the Norton utilities (and to deal with lots of environment variables). I would sometimes deal with languages other than English (doesn't everybody?), so I used the MODE command and DISPLAY.SYS heavily to set up code pages for other than 437. I have tried the old method I used from a command prompt under W98, and it complains no-can-do (and, of course, the old MODE from MS-DOS will not work). I used ANSI.SYS (actually, NANSI.SYS) much to my advantage. I set up my own disk caching. And so on. I call myself a klutz, but I *was* able to accomplish useful things with DOS, and I have always thought that with a command line, I am more in command. With the Windoozy interface, I seem not to be in control. -- Paul mailto:bartlett AT smart DOT net .......................................................... Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA Keyserver (0xF383C8F9) or WWW for PGP public key Home Page: http://www.smart.net/~bartlett