DSL, Win XP and Xy

[PSJRBROWN@xxxxxxxx]

Forgive the foray into these troubled waters again, but I'd very much
appreciate
some friendly help in sorting out the following tangles:

1. Been using Xy 3.55 for many years, but also happy enough with XyDos 4.017
(never bothered to get 4.018). This is not the issue I want to deal with here.

2. I'm also working at multiple sites, and installing and uninstalling Xy
wherever I need to. Dragging a Zip drive and lots of Zip disks around with me
so
I can recreate systems I need quickly, where I need them (amazing what you can
do with an accessible parallel port).

3. Also using AOL for e-mail, due mostly to the legacy need to receive
messages
from lots of people who still use my AOL address and *cannot* be relied upon
to
change even after notification. (And yes, I do have a university-supplied ad-
dress that will serve as an indirect address to me, no matter what ISP I
choose
in the future. Again, though, people have to get used to that over a period of
months.)

4. I'm running Win 95 with Xy (whatever version) in full screen mode.

5. Ordered DSL from the phone company on a "free trial offer."

This is where the fun begins. I wanted to get DSL working before I switched
away
from AOL (and I don't want to pay two ISPs any more than I have to). Of
course,
after weeks of fussing, DSL still didn't install; I finally got through to
"third-level" tech support at Verizon (the DSL provider).

They informed me I couldn't do what I wanted because Win 95 has only 4 TCP/IP
bindings. DSL needs three of those, and AOL needs two: total, more than 4. Win
98 has 9 such bindings, and so I begin think, maybe it's time to upgrade to
98--
or else really dump AOL and go cold turkey with DSL. I seriously don't want
to
do the latter (no love lost with AOL, but am I really going to hang all my
e-mail on untested DSL?). But "upgrading" to Win 98 means multiple, careful
backups to Zip drives (yeah, that's another issue, but let's not go there
either), more money to MS for the 98 upgrade, hours doing the 98 install--OK,
so it's doable, but a pain.

So I'm thinking, instead of lugging a Zip drive and 15 Zip disks back and
forth,
or bothering to upgrade to Win 98 on my home machine, maybe I'll just get a
lap-
top with an Ethernet card, and use the *laptop* for DSL. At least DSL should
in-
stall readily (?) on a new machine with the latest MS OS, right???

So Dell tells me their cheaper laptops are their "home" (not "business") ma-
chines, and they all have Win XP "native." Their best advice: add 98 myself.
I'd
pay much more for a "business" machine with 98, which has less horsepower than
the home machine. Someone on this list noted months ago that it ain't that
simple.... That brings me full circle, back to carrying Zip drives
around (I'm on a budget).

I truly do not want to spend more endless hours trying to fool MS's 32-bit OS
into working with our indispensable "legacy" 16-bit program. I don't want to
partition a new drive into XP and something else (DOS 3.3 anyone?), because I
want to copy between Xy and various other programs.

Does any of this begin to ring true?

Bottom line: Can anyone assure me that Xy4, at least, will run full screen on
XP? (Xy 3.55 would be nice too, but I don't want to get into the further
tangle
of the CUA conventions.) Or shall I hang tough with Win 98, shell out the
extra
bucks for it (one way or the other), and make *that* the OS that works with
both
DSL and Xy? Maybe DSL isn't worth the trouble either, except that AOL over
normal phone lines in New York has been ugly since 9/ll.

Arrrgghhhh!

Peter Brown
psjrbrown@xxxxxxxx