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From: cosheff@netmbx.UUCP (Charles Shefflette)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: MS DOS 5.0
Message-ID: <1623@netmbx.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jan 91 02:35:05 GMT
References: <1991Jan2.114821.1822@vax5.cit.cornell.edu>
Distribution: comp
Organization: netmbx, Berlin, West Germany
Lines: 48

iqe@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes:

>Does anyone out there (perhaps someone who has seen or is using a beta ver)
>know (or have an idea of what we can expect:

>       How much of the precious 640K will DOS 5 take up?
Not a lot - from what I've seen of the beta version, about 30k, including
the interrupt vector area.

>       Can things be loaded into the 640K - 1M area with DOS 5?
Yes - but it's still better to use a memory manager such as QEMM.

>       Can part of the OS be loaded above 1M?
Yes - a command in the CONFIG.SYS file allows DOS to load itself into the
HMA provided either by QEMM (or another such manager) or HIMEM.SYS.

>       Can part of the OS be loaded into EMS (code can be loaded into
>       EMS, cant it?)?
See the previous answer, from what I've seen, the option is to use the HMA
or to have the OS in low memory.  (and yes, code can be loaded into EMS)

I've been looking at a beta version of 5.0 dated late 1990, for the most
part I'm quite impressed.  It still has a couple of slight bugs in it.  For
one thing Paradox 3.5 dies horribly when using DOS 5.0/QEMM5.1 (and worse with
QEMM5.0).  On the other hand, it works fine when used without QEMM... sigh...
Generally, however, anything that worked with DOS 4.0 and below seems to
work fine with DOS 5.0.  One thing that I noticed was that it is no longer
apparently necessary to load SHARE.EXE to support disk partitions which are
larger than 32MB!!  That in itself saves about 5KB of memory!

The new editor they are shipping with it isn't half bad, either, although
I was rather dismayed to find that you MUST HAVE Quick BASIC around to run
it (it's a .COM file which is interpreted by QB) - they include QB in the DOS
package, however.

Most of the commands now have built in (minimal in most cases) help which
is available by typing the command followed by a '/?'.

I'm not sure what else to say, I'm favorably impressed and will probably
migrate to it when it becomes available..

Chuck

Charles Shefflette, System Engineer                     cosheff@netmbx.UUCP
                                                       cosheff@bitcave.UUCP
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