Upgrading: Precautions before

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

This is somewhat in answer to Judith's post, but not precisely what she
was asking, so I thought it should have a new thread.
Anyone thinking of getting a new PC, and especially if your current one
looks to be on its last legs, should copy your whole XyDOS and
(particularly) XyWin setup to removable media. If you've nothing else,
ZIP them to floppies. Preferably, copy to CD-R or a ZIP disk (XyDOS, with
U2 and all the printer drivers in the original distribution, plus XyWin
take up approximately 20 Mb, so they'll easily fit on a 100 Mb ZIP. While
you're at it, copy any other DOS apps you're running.) Note your
directory structure and re-create it on the new machine or be prepared to
edit STARUP.INT and SETTINGS.DFL and their XyWin counterparts--unless, of
course, you're using Carl's portable setup.
There are, of course, other ways of getting Xy from the old to the new
PC, but if the old one dies, they won't be much use. Temporarily
installing the old hard drive in the new PC isn't rocket science, but it
does involve opening the box, and isn't usually practicable with laptops.
Network connections work fine, if the old PC is running (and has a
Network Interface Card [NIC}). A Direct Cable Connection (DCC) between
two Windows PCs works, but--at least in 9x--it is a goshawful, poorly
documented, unintuitable kludge; I had a book to help me and had to work
through a few false leads before I got it working the one time I did it
(wasn't for this: I needed to run an installation routine off a CD, and
the laptop has no CD drive).
On the new machine, I'd recommend having a separate partition (even
better, of course, a separate physical hard drive) for XyDOS, XyWin, and
any other DOS apps you run. Then, if you should at some future date have
to reinstall Windows (you probably will), you can reformat C: without
losing you DOS apps.
Patricia