Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!mikey
From: mikey@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Michael GALLOP)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: MS/PC DOS 3.3 vs 4.? (which is better?)
Message-ID: <5268@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 15 Oct 90 21:02:05 GMT
References: <1990Oct15.025303.6582@odetics.com>
Distribution: na
Organization: SOCS - Mcgill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 54

****
* frank@odetics.UUCP (Frank Merrow) did cause to be know:
*
>Hi - I have a quick question,
>
>I have been running under the assumption that DOS 4.x is NOT the way to
>go.  I guess someplace I heard that it is MUCH bigger than 3.3 and that
>the "graphical interface" (is this COMMAND.COM?) is not that good.  In
	
	The "graphical interface" is actually a shell program completely
different from COMMAND.COM It is called in the autoexec.bat file
and can be easily removed.

	Depends on what you mean by much bigger. (If memory serves me
correctly...) DOS 3.3 was ~700K in size. While 4.01 is somewhat larger,
on the order of 1.5 MB

>scanning some other News I happened to notice that 4.x supports disc
>partitions bigger than 32K.  IF THIS IS TRUE it is a VERY big plus.  Is
>the shell really all that bad.  Does is really support partition bigger
>than 32K?  
Dos 1.0a supports discs bigger than 32K. 32K = 32768 bytes
The question is does DOS 4.0x support discs bigger than 32 MB as the 
primary disc? The answer is an unequivocal yes. I run a 386 with a Large
hard drive. Using Dos 4.01 the primary partition is 135 MB.

>Do you have to use this "graphical interface" or is there
>something more like COMMAND.COM included also?  
No, There is a command.com, see above.


>How does Windows 3.0 and
>DOS 4.x get along.  
Great, almost like the same company made them :-)
This isn't to say there aren't problems-- Microsoft ought to have 
shipped a Windows aware chkdsk with windows. I know I made that mistake
_Once_ (!) 

>How about utilities like Mace and Fastback - do they
>have problems with the large partitions?  I assume that even though
>the Hard Disc is a large partition that the standard floppies still
>work too (even Microsoft would not dare screw up that bad).

Okay. MACE-1990 releases work. Fastback Plus 2.01 + works and Norton 4.5 +
All have no problem. Norton even ressurrected the hard drive after a fault 
in the carbon based hardware (me! :-)) 

So DOS 4.01 isn't the best. There are bugs. I personally wouldn't run it on
anything with only 640k and a small (less than 40) Hard drive.
But get up to a 386 with 4-8 MB cache, 300 MB drive and other toys and I 
think it's worth the extra 30K of conventional RAM taken....IMHO :-)
-- 
| mikey@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca |  Mike Gallop				   |
| "Stop that! It's silly... Now let's have some REAL military discipline!" |