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From: teittinen@cc.helsinki.fi
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: MS-DOS 4.01 vs. 3.3
Message-ID: <2943.26d077ac@cc.helsinki.fi>
Date: 20 Aug 90 23:52:12 GMT
References: <38144@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 39

In article <38144@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich
Wales) writes:
> When 4.01 (or maybe it was the original 4.0, I don't remember) first
> came out, I recall hearing various reports that it was flaky, and that
> one would be better off sticking with 3.3 (or the maintenance release,
> 3.30A, which fixed the DRIVPARM parsing bug and a few other things).
> 
> Is this still true?  Or is 4.01 considered stable and OK to use now?

As far as I know (and I've been using 4.01 for a looong time now) there
are no more bugs in 4.01 than any other version of DOS. At the moment I
can't remember any that would have come across, though I found some of
the 4.0 bugs.

> As far as I am currently aware, the only real reason one might prefer
> 4.01 over 3.3 is that 4.01 can use a disk larger than 32 meg without
> having to partition it.  Are there any other reasons?

I myself prefer 4.01 to 3.3. I currently don't use large partitions
either, but there are many added handy options to many familiar DOS
commands. And the GRAPHICS.COM can print EGA and VGA graphics screens
too. And the new MEM-program that shows all kinds of data about the
memory usage is very handy too. And I've possibly forgot to mention some
nice features that I use so often that I can't even think thay havn't
been there all the time. The truth is, that whenever I have to do
anything with earlier DOS-version than 4, I notice within 10 minutes
that one or another feature is missing.

The only drawback of 4.01 is that it requires a bit more memory than
3.3 (especially if you accept AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS created by the
installation program), but you can free memory by using MEM and
modifying AUTOEXEC and CONFIG.

This is just my opinion. 4.01 haters, don't bother to flame.

-- 
E-Mail: teittinen@finuh.bitnet               !
        teittinen@cc.helsinki.fi             ! UNIX is a four-letter word
Marko Teittinen, student of computer science !