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Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
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DOS6--06.ART
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NWA-MCUG 6/93 NewsLetter Article
Rt 4 Box 376 Springdale, AR 72762-9307
What's Up With That?
Somewhat Enlightening Computer Talk
John Davis, South Mountain User Group
From 06/93 SMUG Newsletter
This month, after the near-riot caused by DOS 6 bashing at the general
meeting, I feel it is my duty to help make the road to upgrade a bit smoother. I
had two choices, write my own DOS 6, or troubleshoot the installation
procedures of Microsoft's hand grenade on disk: DOS 6. I'm not IBM, so I chose
the latter. I will address what I consider to be the two most likely pitfalls in
the upgrade process: Doublespace and Smartdrive.
First off, neither of these is a true virus, in spite of the feelings from some
upgrade victims. They're too big for one thing and you don't pay 50 bucks for a
virus; consider them prescription medication that should be taken with care
(and possibly under tested by the computing equivalent of the FDA). Both
utilities work well enough if understood and will almost certainly disable some
systems if not understood.
You are restoring a car (go with me on this). You are cramped for garage
space, and not real well organized besides, but you, Joe Grease-monkey, tear
into the task anyway, putting in new parts as you can grab them and tossing
old ones recklessly out, but soon you find no maneuvering room for the tranny
that you've pulled, and you can't put it back (you've tossed the malvo).
Should've started with a clean shop, a plan, and more room.
With what is arguably the worst analogy in computing history, I've just
provided the basis for users' problems installing Doublespace: Excessively
fragmented disks and a lack of system RAM.
Solution?
1) Houseclean. Get rid of all the old or redundant files for which you have no
further need. Then, de-fragment the drive with Speed Disk or Compress or some
similar tool. This makes for a lighter load for Doublespace.
2) Backup -- just in case. At least the irreplaceable data files.
3) Boot to a clean system. No TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident programs),
drivers, etc. You want as close to 640K as possible. I would not boot off a
floppy because you want the COMSPEC to point to the hard drive to prevent
Doublespace from weirding out. I would not run Memmaker yet; I know it should
work, but so far the system ain't broke, so don't introduce more variables into
the equation.
4) Run Doublespace.
5) NOW you can run memmaker.
That should take care of the problems most people are having with
Doublespace. In many cases, the utility just doesn't have the elbow room
needed to work through the conversion to a compressed volume file (CVF), but
has passed the point of no return to restore the old setup.
For the guys with long term problems of corrupted or missing data, the likely
culprit in DOS 6 is Smartdrive. The boys in Redmond wanted a way to speed up
the system for the operator, but they forgot to tell the operator that they've
removed the seatbelts from the data. Smartdrive's default installation uses
"lazy writes" to expedite control of the system to you. Simply put, Smartdrive
delays writing from the cache in RAM to the hard drive, until it detects
periods of inactivity. Not necessarily a bad idea, it takes care of tedious
waits for long saves, doing them in the background, while allowing you to have
immediate control of the keyboard after you think you've made a disk write. The
problem is that you think that your data is safely stored on the hard drive,
when in fact the data may not have been flushed from the cache buffers in RAM.
To compound the problem DOS 6 will let you save something, exit the
application, and return you to the DOS prompt, possibly without actually
writing the save to the hard drive! Most of us consider the DOS prompt a safe
haven -- Once we're there, it's safe to power down. Not necessarily so in DOS
6. My suggestion: Wait about 5 seconds after returning to the DOS prompt to
allow Smartdrive to flush the buffers. If you see no hard drive light after 5
seconds, you're safe. If Smartdrive can't flush your data, you just did.
The solution to DOS 6 then is to understand the doublespeak behind
Doublespace and be a smart driver of Smartdrive. For Memmaker, you're on your
own. Upgrade me to next month's issue...