August 30, 1988

By Kevin Macy

DOS 4.00 From IBM

Another Opinion

	I just finished reading 1 person's experiences with DOS 4.0
from IBM. I largely agree with the text but I had to throw my
experiences in too.

	First off I bought DOS 4.0 for my Tandy 3000HL with 1.5 Meg
expanded memory and 30 meg hard drive. PC-DOS has always made my
machine run better so I have been faithful to IBM DOS since 3.1.
The following is my account of installing DOS 4.0:

	First off I decided to run it from floppy for several days
to see how my hardware handled the DOS. As with DOS 3.3 DRIVPARM
does not work in config.sys so I looked for DRIVPARM in the
IBMBIO.COM file and found it with PCTOOLS. Using debug and
PCTOOLS together I then looked for the way to hook it back up
like the patch for DOS 3.3. (DRIVPARM.ARC) I succeeded but found
that FORMAT with DOS 4 will no longer format the disk I define
with DRIVPARM. By the way that disk is a 3.5" 720k floppy as
drive B:. Even the newest Tandy BIOS roms fail to handle the
setup so DRIVPARM was the best choice. I aleviated the FORMAT
problem by using the PCFORMAT utility with PCTOOLS which works
great. Other utilities for formatting work as well. DOS FORMAT
still works with any drive not defined in DRIVPARM.

	Next I installed DOS 4 on my hard drive satisfied that all
was well. But before using the auto install feature I found that
I had to play with my RLL controller to get it to see 30 meg
instead of 20. That took a while but I succeeded. Before using
the auto install feature I used FDISK to create a new partition
which erased my old data. Yes I made sure it was backed up first!
Then using the auto install feature I installed DOS 4 to the hard
disk. It went smoothly and all was well.

	I did find that the auto install set config.sys files up to
some unrealistic BUFFERS settings. So using a stopwatch I reset
the BUFFERS settings and deleted some of the waist in the
config.sys file. Doing this gained me 11K in user ram so it was
worth it. The DOS SHELL was not affected by any of these changes
or any of the other operations for that matter.

	I found no incompatibilities with the programs I use except
for one, PCTOOLS ver 4.22. I remembered reading in a news release
on DOS 4 that any programs that compress the hard disk would have
disasterous results. A quick call to Central Point Software fixed
that. They told me they already were working on a new version
that was compatible, ver 4.3. A week later they sent it to me for
a modest upgrade price. I have used all the TSR's I could
possibly think of and found no problems with any of them. Friends
were telling me that Norton Utilities would not work. But it
worked on mine okay. I suspect the trouble amy have been the
differances in hard drives because he had a 80 meg installed as 1
partitioned contigeous drive. I think thats why NORTON chokes
with it. I'll bet that problem will be short lived with another
upgrade probably. I could be wrong too. I use a lot of
applications and have found that they all run with no trouble.
Microsoft Excel seems a little bit more file responsive than with
previous versions of DOS. 

	All in all DOS 4 works great with my hardware and software
but I do not have access to a great number of machines that I can
test it on. As with all previous versions of DOS there will be
bugs to be worked out. DRIVPARM was one of my pet peeves becuase
it named my floppy the correct drive letter name without loading
ASSIGN that does not work that well any way. I look for more
patches in the future that will enhance this verison of DOS. It
gives us something to do and learn something along the way.