-------------- Original message ---------------------- From: Gerry Hickman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Hi Mark, > > > As you say, this sounds like a good reason to use a hard disk, although > I'm somewhat confused as to why it can't use the memory and disk caching > to achieve it's goal?
Well, no, the morse code is being sent by twiddling a bit on the parallel port. There is critical information that must be saved somewhere...a RAM disk is not acceptable. The problem with USB sticks on a LOT of installations (most, even) is that the write cycle interfears with sending the morse code. SMARTDRV helps somewhat (using MS-DOS) but even that is often not enough. Some of the USB sticks I'm using are, of course, USB-1, and many of the machines also have USB-1 ports. I COULD spend a lot of effort getting this working on a USB stick on a particular machine, but the dual boot works so well, and solves this problem so nicely, that I think this is the way to go. > Bear > in mind the data sticks of today are MUCH faster than the hard drives > DOS was designed to work with. This is frankly not what I see...MUCH slower transfers to or from USB sticks than hard drives...perhaps an order of magnitude slower in fact. > > > This procedure takes ten minutes. Re-installing Windows XP, installing > > all of the applications I have on this machine, and reconfiguring > > everything would take days...not just hours. > > Yes, well obviously I'm talking about doing it BEFORE you have installed > any applications! Still requires re-installing WindowsXP. Why would I want to try that trick when I can resize the partition in a few minutes? Also, I think many XP install/rescue CD's blow away the entire disk, so the old technique (wipe the disk, install DOS, install XP) may not even work. This work laptop is dual-booted. It used to be triple booted with Linux but I took Linux off when I started to run out of disk space. DOS is given a 500MB partition, which is plenty. It's nice to be able to use WindowsXP to download files to that partition and to run some of the utilities without rebooting DOS too. Mark > > -- > Gerry Hickman (London UK) > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files > for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes > searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
