Re: DOS commands

["Patricia M. Godfrey" pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Couldn't agree more with Jordan about the need to do things at the
command line. Though I often use XyWDOS as a file manager, I had
forgotten that it too has an attrib command. And of course, once you say
it, it's obvious why the OS would "think" anything copied from a CD was
read-only; but ever since I got a CD-R, I tend to think of CDs as giant
floppies or portable hard drives.
	Yes XCopy still exists in Win9.x (don't know about 2000, ME, or XP). In
95 you could strip or retain H, R, and S attributes; in 98 they nastily
removed the ability to XCOPY hidden and system files from pure DOS (i.e.,
after shutting down and booting to the DOS prompt), thus making it
impossible to just XCOPY your whole system to another partition and
thence to a CD. (You cannot XCOPY all the system files while you're in
Win, because some of them are in use). Really dumb, from M$'s point of
view, because if people could put their own system on a CD and run it on
other computers when they need to, they'd be less tempted to make and use
illegal copies or run one copy permanently on several systems. Not to
mention the need to back up your system before something "fixes"
something on it that you didn't want fixed.
	The editors of PC World have apparently never heard of XyWrite.
Here is the e-mail I'm sending them about an egregious misstatement (and
some other matters) in their February issue:
≪George Campbell is mistaken when he says (Word Processing Tips,
February, p. 96) that before Word 2002 "Word processing software has
never before been able to select multiple, noncontiguous blocks of text
to copy and paste into documents." Ever since 1993 at least, XyWrite 4
has had the ability to append defined text to what was already in the
clipboard, thus enabling one to collect any number of items and paste
them together. One reason, no doubt, why editors still swear by this
oldie but goodie.
	One good reason to patronize a local shop rather than a big store or
Dell direct (February: "Superb PC Service still Lives") is that local
shops will often sell you a system with no preinstalled OS, and you can
then partition the hard drive before installing your OS (assuming you
have a legal copy that you're taking off your old system). That not
merely saves you the cost of a special partitioning package (cf.
Step-by-Step, which doesn't even mention the native FDISK utility), it
also means you don't have to worry about Microsoft's latest bug farm not
supporting half your favorite or mission-critical apps.≫
Patricia