Re: new pc finally arrived and have to make decisions-help

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

Avrom Fischer wrote:
> I am revisiting what operating system to use.
First of all, you will be limited in what opsys you use by what drivers
are available. If the PC or any of its components (e.g. graphc card,
modem, network card) don't have drivers for 98, then you cannot run 98.
Or at least not without a lot of New Hardware Found messages popping up
whenever you boot.
> call them up for printing in wordlperfect 5.1 for dos
Chacun à son gout, but why not print from Xy all the time? With a PC of
that speed, using TYP should be lickety-split.
>  I intend to follow Robert Holmgren's advice to open my dos programs with separate icons rather than
> going to a dos prompt and using bat files and to not use a dual boot.

Good.
> Is my relatively good experience with xp due to the limited things I do with the programs or dumb luck.
Or to the fact that you're using an AMD CPU?
> converting word perfect documents to pdf using adobe writer and/or distiller and filing those pdf
> documents electronically with courts.
You don't need WordPerfect for that. XyWrite converts to PDFs very
nicely, thanks to Robert's XY2PDF routine in U2.
> My hard drive is much larger than I really need.
Just DO NOT leave it all one big hard drive. Partition it. I assume
since you're asking that the opsys isn't installed yet. So you can
(maybe) use Windows native partitioning tool (it's not FDISK anymore;
diskpart, maybe?) I say maybe, becuse when I was setting up the office's
XP box I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to create logical
drives on the initial (boot) disk. Fortunately, we had two physical hard
drives, and once Windows was set up, it was duck soup to partition the
second drive and create umpteen logical drives. If, in fact, BBBG has
disabled the ability of Windows native to create logical drives on your
boot disk (anyone?), you can always get Partition Magic. Or get Acronis
True Image, which both partitions and makes images (backups) of your
Windows system FROM WITHIN Windows.
At an absolute mimimum, you need two partitions: Windows and
Applications on one, data on the other. Lately, I've been doing this:
C: Windows and Windows apps (WP Win Insists on going there; it's not
worth the struggle)
D: Dos apps (Xy, WP DOS in your case, dBase in mine, etc.)
E: DATA (all the files you create)
F: Downloads and Drivers: I also copy the Windows setup CD, or at least
its Cab files, to a folder here so that if I'm installing something from
a CD and it asks for the Windows CD, I don't have to switch discs (and
run the risk of the install routine getting confused--which happens).
Copy the drivers for your particular setup from the driver CD too
(driver CDs almost always include drivers for half a dozen differnt
models; you can go bonkers figuring out which is yours. Don't do it more
than once.) But in your case you might want to put all this on the
external backup hard drive. Or not. Or both (best, of course)
The advantage is that if Windows gets irretrievably corrupted (or
infected with malware) you can format C: and reinstall without losing
your data.
> would appreciate advice on size of partitions.
I dont's recall off the top of my head what the 9x drive size limitation
is (I never use drives that big), but I'd keep my DOS apps and data
drive under it, and split the remainder equally between C: and F. If you
were working with graphics or video or music, of course, you'd need a
bigger data drive.
> would it pay to create and use a windows 98se dos prompt boot disk when I use dos programs I had asked this before but no one commented on that idea.
Probably couldn't hurt. You'd have it for emergencies, but you would not
be able to access the Internet. I'm not sure, though, about modern drive
geometries being readible from a 98 DOS boot disk. Anyone with more
experience of XP will surely tell you.

Patricia M. Godfrey