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From: cpm5479@zeus.tamu.edu (Christopher Menzel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: DOS 5.0 SmartDrive Problems (One man's adventure...)
Message-ID: <17715@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 24 Jun 91 03:28:13 GMT
References: <2848@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>
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In article <2848@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>, ronp@cs.umr.edu (Ron Pacheco) writes...
>I have seen some discussion on problems with MS-DOS 5.0 SmartDrive and
>thought I would contribute my experience.  Up front, I estimate the IQ
>of SmartDrive under MS-DOS 5.0 at about one, and that is a generous
>estimate.
> 
>[Detailed account of SmartDrive problems omitted.]
>
>Anyone else out there with similar experiences?

Nothing as scary as what you detail, but irksome nonetheless.  First
day I used DOS 5 everything seemed okay.  Second day, when I started
to give it a more rigorous workout my system (Dell 220 20 MHz 286, 4
meg) started to hang or reboot itself when I'd try to run a DOS
program from Windows about half the time; by the end of the day it
happened pretty much every time.  Tried everything, finally isolated
SmartDrive as the culprit.  Replaced it with the cache that came
with PC Tools 6 (which seems to speed things up at least as well as
SmartDrive) and the system hasn't hung once since--and believe me,
I've tried hard to break it to make sure.  I should note that I had
the same problem intermittently when I was using DOS 3.3 and running
the SmartDrive that came with Windows.  Seems likely to me that it
was the culprit then as well. 

Chris