I've been using DR-DOS for some time and I am able to make the following
recommendations:
The biggest drawback of this system is EMM386.EXE. Don't use it unless you want to
use the multitasking or the DPMI host.
. Although the great majority of DOS applications will work fine, sometime you will
encounter incompatibilities.
DR-DOS EMM386.EXE is much slower than other products of its kind (installing Arachne
with QEMM caused the
setup wizard to detect my machine correctly as being a 40 MHZ 486; using EMM386 that
comes with DR-DOS,
Arachne stated my machine was a 386, which is at least 2 times slower). You will feel
the lack of speed when playing some games
(providing they work), or even when browsing with Arachne.
Using QEMM or MS-DOS EMM386 is a much better alternative.
Pay attention to the following if you decide to install QEMM:
- You may not be able to use the quick boot feature. On my system it complains about
not being able to find the ROM-BIOS handler for INT 1A
- Also, you may not be able to use Dos-up since DR-DOS does the job of Dos-up by
default. I've always liked DR-DOS for the great ammount of conventional memory it
offered.
I've obtained about 624k of low memory without effort, since almost every component
of the
operating system is loaded high, or in the upper memory. This makes Dos-up to be
redundant,
anyway, but also increases the risk of incompatibilty with some badly written
software. (i.e. I have to
skip the execution of the config files, or to load DOS low when I want to setup my
NIC).
- If using Stacker,(which I think is better than Doublespace),together with QEMM,
add /QD parameter to
the STACKER.INI file. for gaining some memory and to take advantage of some features
of the program which were developed by Stac together with Quarterdeck.
Most times, using Optimize may result in a worse configuration than without using
it.
Cristian Burneci
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate Internet Client
-- Arachne V1.60;b1, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
