MS-DOS 6.0

Software review by Hugh Bayless

All the computer media is proclaiming Microsoft's MS-DOS 6.0 as
the hottest new thing on the computer horizon.  It's good, but it
is really not much more than an upgrade of 5.0 to catch up with
DR DOS 6.0, with some excellent utilities added.

MS-DOS 6.0 will "upgrade" from MS-DOS 5.0 and OS/2, and it
"upgraded" from my DR DOS 6.0 very handily.  Its memory manager,
MEMMAKER, worked easily and gave me almost as much free
conventional memory as I had with DR DOS.  You can do even better
with customizing memory yourself.  One shortcoming; DR DOS will
load both FILES and BUFFERS into the high memory area, but MS-DOS
6.0 will only load BUFFERS high.  This problem can be overcome by
using a short utility, UMBFILES, included on the disk that comes
with the book, DOS 6 Memory Management with Utilities (see the
book review elsewhere in this issue), which lets you load your
FILES high and save that space in conventional memory.

In everyday use, there is not enough difference between MS-DOS
and DR DOS to mention.  The DOS commands are generally the same
and do much the same things.  They are both equally compatible
with Windows 3.1 and all of the other software I use.  The file
recovery systems in the two are approximately equal.  MS-DOS does
include a good anti-virus program and its DoubleSpace compression
promises to double your hard disk capacity.  While I have not yet
tried DoubleSpace, some users have reported problems, so I don't
plan to try it in my own computer.

There is a handy utility in MS DOS 6.0 to save your CMOS setup so
that if you lose your CMOS memory, you can reinstall it from a
boot disk in your A: drive.

The anti-virus utility is licensed from Central Point and works
just like their own excellent program.  Defragmentation of hard
disks is done with the well-known defragmenter from Symantec,
also the supplier of Microsoft's backup utility, and it works
just as perfectly as Symantec's own version.

One welcome feature, long overdue, is the ability to bypass
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT commands when starting up.  Handy if
you need to "clean boot" your system and necessary if you changed
one of these two files in a way that prevents proper startup.
Also, by pressing <F8> at startup, you can choose which
CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT commands to execute and which to
skip.  Of course, DR DOS 6.0 already has this.  Also, as in DR
DOS there is an excellent on-line help system available from your
keyboard.

To sum up, if you are using MS-DOS 5.0 or earlier, you will
definitely like the $49.99 bargain upgrade, but if you are a DR
DOS 6.0 user and are already using its data compression program,
you may want just stick with it or wait for DR DOS 7.0, which is
supposed to be out in a few months.