DOS 5.0

[JOHN WAGER]

Just a couple of additions to your notes about installing DOS 5.0. I
sprang for the upgrade at Egghead, too. For $40, you get your money's
worth; some people would pay that just for Quickbasic. I noticed a
couple of interesting things when I installed it. I went from ver. 3.3
to 5.0, so I used FDISK to make my disk partitions bigger than 32MB.
(5.0 does not require use of SHARE for big volumes.) When reformatting
the disks, I noticed a message "Trying to recover allocation unit XXXX."
Apparently FORMAT now tries to look at whatever you have previously
marked as "bad" to see if it's really bad, and tries to use part of it
if possible. Nice small touch. And SETVER came in handy; it makes a
list of programs that DOS can "fool" by reporting an earlier version
number. My version of MANIFEST wouldn't work with 5.0, but using SETVER
got it going again, thinking it was dealing with an earlier version of
DOS though. Reporting numbers seemed accurate, except for the version
number. I also liked the way it set up an "uninstall" disk just in case
you want to forget the whole thing and go back to your earlier version
of DOS. Much smoother than anything else I've seen from DOS for quite
some time! Just to give another small example, I have 4DOS files in
the \DOS directory, and one of the files for 4DOS is named HELP.EXE.
DOS 5.0 has a filename of the same name, so it respectfully moved my
HELP.EXE to an OLD_DOS.1 subdir to keep it safe. I've always been a
bit wary of changing DOS versions (which is why I was using 3.3) but
the price and what I've seen so far convinced me to jump now.