Seeing all the discussions on these, I write from my personal experiences : MSDos 2.11 : My favourite dos ! Very small, Very tight, never hung up. Allowed to create virtual disks ! WordStar3 loaded in a Virtual disk from 360KB 5.25" Floppies with output in files in the virtual disk itself, and later saved to a floppy. Later on also 720KB 3.5" floppies ! Looked as if I wouldn't need a HardDisk (for speed) or anymore power ! Dos 3.3 : Sturdy, stable, ok to run almost all that i needed to run. SW I used was NortonCommander 3, FoxBase2.0, PCAnywhere, Lotus123 ver 2, Wordstar3, Norton Editor, Norton Utilities, PCTools, and a few other Dos programs. I also got a Menu based program from British Council Library along with their computer for doing all dos functions like formating, copying, xcopying, comparing, ... all from a simple drop down light bar menu. Oh yes ! It allowed working with 1.44 3.5" floppies ! Much more diskspace on the floppy. And I got a 10MB HardCard ( a HDD controller card on a steel sheet onto which was mounted a 3.5" HDD of 1" height !) This was inserted into an ISA slot and the weight of the HDD was supported by the chasis of the machine. MSDos 5 : Rock Sturdy, stable, as good as ver 3.3, but with a few more things. Particularly the Interserver programs. All comments made for ver 3.3 apply here too. The Menu based utilities worked on this one too. And of course Stacker versions 1, 2, and 3 worked very well. MSDos 6.22 : Stable, Sturdy as good as ver 3.3, ver 5 with some more additional features like compressed drives ! Good thing but the compressed drives did give trouble now and then. Win 3.10 : Good, Nice, worked on Hercules Monitors (called MDA) gave excellent resolution of 720x480. I find it better than the 640 resolution offered now (especially if 800 resolution is not supported on an old PC). Readable. But no networking ! Ran all the old programs ! New Diskedit program came in very handy for total control over hardisks MBR, BootSector, FAT1 FAT2, DirectoryArea. Started using Norton Antivirus NAV which detected changes in the CRC of exe files and warned if virus changed that. NC4 was just out and worked fine. Wfw 3.11 : Excellent Windows even today Regrettably stopped supporting he HGC card for display ! Bye bye to 720 res, hello VGA 640 res ! But supported networking. I could log in from floppy based machines into a HDD machine with Wfw 3.11 thru a LAN card ! Win 95 : Nicer than Wfw 3.11 but much more resource hungry. Crashed ! Reinstalled ! Crashed ! Reinstalled ! Many times over. Doesn't seem to be stable. With loading of many programs, became slower and slower needing reformating C Drive to remover old registry and became fast once again. Many new progrms like Norton Utilities for Win9x helped. Sometimes helped by making Win9x slow down to absurd levels, too much monitoring. Overall impression, good but difficult to handle OS. Good thing was it allowed Wfw 3.11 to run nicely in both methods. - 1 By formatting a fresh hardisk as 2nd Drive and transferring only the command subdirectory and the files in the Windows subdirectory without all the rest of the subdirectories in the Windows subdirectory. Win 98 : Good but not so good. Will not allow to run Wfw 3.11 to run. But running music, video, multimedia was much more fun ! It played CDs which Win95 did not ! With several free and shareware programs it is almost equivalent to WinMe in performance and ability. With the added advantage of NOT insisting that you have a 233MHz or above Pentium ! Win2k : What a misnomer ! It was an upgrade to WinNT ! Not to Win98 ! With the 2K compatability a big issue, everyone wanted to upgrade Win98 to Win2k ! So much confusion ! Never tried it out. Win Me : Millenieum Edition ! Wow ! Win 95 could be upgraded to it ! But the upgrade didn't upgrade the Win95 ! It needs a Pentium chip of 233MHz or above. I had to buy a new motherboard and jump from 486 environment to 233Mhz Pentium ! It was so costly. Never found happiness to liver ever after with WinMe. NO it was more not Me than it was me ! Had to Discard it ! Reverted back to Win95 ! At least it was the NEWER windows program than Wfw3.11 ! Yet I find running Wfw3.11 on the Win95 platform a more satisfying, easy, stabler task. A BAD thing, it won't let you be in command with the familiar MSDos loading first. IT MUST load first ! One figthing with the earlier program. Dos will run only under and AFTER WinMe Loads ! Funny ! What happens when WinMe doesn't load ? And if you have several partitions, and several HDD, on every incorrect shutdown it goes into SCANDISKing all the drives and partitions ! Whew ! It made the waiting miserable. Notes : In most of my configuring, I alwasys added the PAUSE line at the end of my AUTOEXEC.BAT file. The system pauses before loading Win95, Win98 and I could alway use Ctrl-C and terminate loading of Win95/98 without gingerly tapping the F8 key ! And without using any TWEAK or other program to prevent loaing windows automatically ! Will SurvPC Dos lovers help the simple DOS OS run the computer for most ofdinary tasks and prevent OS Pollution ! God save us from the oversupply of all those things which we do not need ! And from the frustations caused when those Hi-Ended products don't work and you feel frustrated enought to bang your VDU/CPU with a baseball bat ! The tension it causes is definitey definitely avoidable ! Cycles are still good for short commuting while giving us the much much needed exercise ! A small handheld with Dos5 on a 80186 is good enought to email/fax/download even now thru landline or cellphone. (I have on HPLx700 with a Nokia2110 which does this) To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. 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