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My new garage clone pc from netseller.com finally arrived. I have
previoulsy bothered the list with questions but now that it finally here I have
to actually make decisions. The pc has 2 gigs of ram. an amd 3000 semperon
cpu and 250 gb hard drive. this will be my workhorse pc. I have been using
xp with only minor inconvenience till now. I read robert's comments on
what Ed Mendelson said and that is the reason why I am revisiting what operating
system to use.
I do all my writing of documents in xywrite 4 in a full screen window and either store my documents as pure text and no formating and call them up for printing in wordlperfect 5.1 for dos which is also done in full screen windows or convert my documents which have been formated using word for word to wpdos 5.1 again in a full screen window and print them out . In the case of downloads from lexis or westlaw after some editing in
xywrite and saving them as pure text with no formating commands I print them in
wpdos 5.1 using universal condensed in 9 or 10 pt type and two newspaper columns
per page. documents normally run from 5-40 pages
Documents that I create such as briefs, letters or memorandum and legal
documents are created in xywrite with formating of margins, bolding italics
underline. Almost without exception my margins are always the same one
inch top and bottom and each side. quotes are always block indented on the
left and after converting using word for word, print in dos almost always in new
times roman 11 or 12 point. very rarely do I do any editing in wordperfect
and than just very minor editing. I have no real need for wysiwig either
in xywrite or word perfect
Till now I have had no problems using xp except that when exiting xywrite
my screen freezes on many occasions and I have to alt tab and close to get out
that window. I intend to follow Robert Holmgren's advice to open my
dos programs with separate icons rather than going to a dos prompt and using bat
files and to not use a dual boot. I am satisfied with the display in both
xywrite and wordperfect but I have read both on here and in the Mendelson
wordperfect website about the many other problems people are having with xp and
dos programs. When I use dos programs I rarely access windows programs. Is
my relatively good experience with xp due to the limited things I do with the
programs or dumb luck.
Any suggestions on what os I should use. I did find that window
xp for windows applications was more stable than windows 2000 or windows
98se My primary reason for using windows is using the lexis and westlaw,
ztw (the windows successor to xtree gold,) limited use of word(primarily to read
attachments to emails) emails, converting word perfect documents to pdf using
adobe writer and/or distiller and filing those pdf documents electronically with
courts. I also surf the internet with a heavy emphasis on google. I have a
verizon dsl line. My hard drive is much larger than I really need. In fact
till now I have never using more than 20 gigs on any pc I have owned. I do
have and use an external hard drive (160 gigs) for backup of all my dos
documents and I will use it to back up my emails and faxes.
I plan to use fat32 on my new pc as I have on all my pc's till now as I
have had no problems except for the freezing, but I have never dealt with
logical drives of over 20 gigs. I am very concerned to continue to
use my dos programs and saving those documents. I am comfortable in dos
but feel like a duck out of water in windows of all shades and would not want to
do much tinkering in windows would appreciate advice on size of partitions.
Given my limited use of windows apps, my heavy use of dos programs,
especially xywrite, would appreciate any suggestions on size of drives,
what operating system to use. I am also concerned about problems that I
have not thought about and am not even aware of. Given what Robert wrote on dual
booting windows systems am not interested except wondering would it pay to
create and use a windows 98se dos prompt boot disk when I use dos programs I had
asked this before but no one commented on that idea.
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