Re: on and off topic re purchase of new pc with dos for xywrite

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Further thoughts on Avrom's purchase: rather than two DVD drives (what
would you need them for?), get two hard drives. Not as big as your
original spec, and don't let them configure them as RAID. Install XP
on one, leaving some spare space unpartitioned, then create a
secondary partition on that, with two logical drives: one for
pagefile.sys (1.5 times your total RAM), another to which you copy the
XP CD and any drivers, and on which you store downloaded apps and patches.
Then use the XP partitioning utility (WHAT is it called?) to partition
the other drive: one small, FAT32 primary partition for DOS (or W98 if
you can actually find drivers for it for this hardware, but I doubt
it); another small FAT32 for DOS apps (Xy and anything else), and a
large FAT32 for data.
Then, when you want to boot to DOS, you go into your BIOS and set the
second hard drive to boot before the first; to boot to XP, reverse the
process. No boot-loader to get trashed. At one time Cyber Guys had a
gizmo you could install in an external drive bay, that would let you
turn a knob to choose which hard drive you wanted to boot from. But I
think that was for IDE/ATAPI drives, and I assume this new box will
have SATA (Serial ATA, the new standard for hard drives).
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx