Re: Installing XyW and XyWin on 32-bit MS OSes

["Patricia M. Godfrey" pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Having read the warnings in the XyWin docs about problems installing
under Win95, when I first set up my Win 95 PC (a no-name clone that I
purchased without OS installed, then bought a liquidated copy of Win 95
OSR2), I partitioned the hard drive from DOS 5, installed Win 3.1,
XyWrite DOS and XyWin, and then installed Win 95. The trick was, I put
both versions of XyWrite (and dBase 5 for DOS) on a logical drive D.
Subsequent formattings and reinstallations of Win 95 on C: (something
that has to be done every 2 or 3 years, thanks to DLL hell and registry
madness) have had no effect on drive D. And XyWin is so little a "real"
Windows program that it has no bits and pieces of itself scattered
through the Windows directory. I would suggest copying an already
installed setup (either hard drive to hard drive, or hard drive to ZIP or
CD-R and thence to the new PC's drive) to a separate logical drive (I
assume Partition Magic and System Commander will have versions compatible
with XP soon if they don't already).
	The one thing you need to watch for is that XyWin puts the fonts in a
directory off the root of its drive, not within the XyWin directory, so
both of them have to be copied. (I missed that the last time, but
fortunately have an old 486 running DOS and Win 3.1, onto which I will
install XyWin and then copy it to a ZIP and thence to my D: drive.) I
haven't had any problems printing to an Epson Stylus Color 800 using the
Win 95 driver. But I once tried to install a Lexmark printer on a system
and found that it was a tyrannical piece of hardware, leaving traces of
itself all over the system. (It turned out we couldn't use it, because
the CPU wasn't fast enough!) I had to edit the registry to get rid of it.
	Possibly setting the original Win 3.1 installation to use the Windows
driver (because the only reason I got XyWin was to have True Type fonts)
before you move the whole thing to the 32-bit Windows machine might get
around the printing mess. I've never actually tried printing from XyWrite
for DOS under 95; I do all my editing there, then open the file in XyWin
to print it, since I always need various sizes if not faces.
	Let me add that one could avoid a lot of this hassle if one would stop
dancing to the tune of Compaq-HP, Dell, Gateway, et al. Go get a no-name
clone at a show and sale or a local Three Geeks and a Goat, and install
whatever OS you want, on as many logical drives as you want. It's not
really that difficult, and you're not stuck with proprietary parts. Not
to mention all the extraneous applets and software that you probably
don't want, but Big Brother Compaq, etc. thinks you do.
Patricia M. Godfrey