Sam Ewalt wrote:
>I've always used MS-DOS 6.22, which I'm accustomed to and have a
>reluctance to give up. But if there were a real advantage to using
>a different DOS for this new machine, I might give it a go.
I also use DOS 6.22 on my systems, except the Compaq portable running
Arachne, and that one is DR-DOS 7.02. I installed it not because it seemed
to be specifically recommended for Arachne (although it is), but just
because I wanted to see what an alternate DOS looked like. And it does have
some nice features. The on-line help is much better than for MS-DOS, and
there are extra commands that do extra things. 7.02 works fine with Arachne
once you get past the quirk of not loading DPMI; and, 7.03 is supposed to
have the DPMI quirk fixed, so even that isn't an issue.
But personally, I'd recommend you stick with what you know. The
frustrations of going from one to the other just aren't worth it. For
instance, in 6.22, if you want to search your whole harddrive for a filename
starting with "arach", you can go to the C: directory and give the command--
dir arach*.* /s -- which would search not only the C: directory but the
/subdirectories as well. That doesn't work under DR-DOS; the file isn't
pulled up with that command unless it happens to be in the current
directory. By the time you realize you're not finding files in
subdirectories because you're giving the wrong command, go into the help
function, find the right command (something like-- tree arach*.* --as I
recall), and re-do the search, you've wasted a lot of time. And when you
next want to search for a file, you'll forget all that, give the DOS 6.22
command, and go through the whole process again.
