(from Sam Heywood)
>Upon booting, WIN95 DOS loads a GUI by default. You have to either respond
>to some prompts or resort to a hassle and read some manuals in order to
>figure out how to fix this behavior. This is a very poor design feature,
>IMNSHO. Whether to automatically load a GUI upon booting is something that
>ought to be called or commented out in AUTOEXEC.BAT, as it is in the normal
>versions of Windows (3.x). I don't know why the developers of WIN95 wanted
>to complicate the booting procedure.
Sam,
Remember what Michael Polak posted just a few days ago about loss of user
control with MS-Windows, using an analogy with being an airline passenger? With
MS-Windows, you're just supposed to go along for the ride. MS wants to
emphasize Windows and de-emphasize DOS. MS doesn't even have to hide DOS with
WinNT & 2000, won't have to hide DOS with Whistler.
(from Ricsi)
>Imagine the poweruser who bought a new computer ...
>Athlon 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 50 GB HDD ...
>he will not use DOS, and therefor be limited to a single task !
>(OK ... he will also not run Win ... because he hates rebooting, so DOS/Win
>will be deleted, and some unixish OS will be installed)
>
>Conclusio:
>99% of the people buying a new computer do NOT want/need DOS ...
>so M$ doesn't advertise it.
>
>In reality it's the other way round ...
>aehh this is still the old DOS windows 4 based stuff sick ... I hate dos.
>So that's the reason why Windows millenium hides DOS even better.
What is the greatest amount of RAM (DR-, MS-, PC-, other)DOS can use? DOS
wouldn't know what to do with 256 MB RAM, nor what to do with hard-disk space
above 8 GB. DOS would still be useful for things like seeing what modes the
video card and monitor are capable of, and in the case of Win95/98/ME, for
getting rid of certain viruses. Maybe also to access the Internet in case of
hard-disk crash or inaccessibility due to software glitch (user error, virus,
etc), though mini-Linux might also serve that purpose.
Ricsi, do you still use DOS? I notice the header line in your messages
X-MailConverter: SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
as opposed to the earlier SoupGate-DOS. But then what program actually sends
and receives email messages? I wouldn't even know where to find SoupGate-Win32,
but am not inclined to search since I couldn't use it anyway.
