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S y s t e m O p t i o n E d i t o r _________________________________________________________________ System Option Editor Version 2.3 by: William E. Allen Copyright, 1988-92 by The EZ-SoftWare Company P.O. Box 834, Howell, Michigan 48843 System Option Editor by William E. Allen [75300,272] Copyright 1988-92 by EZ-SoftWare, P.O. Box 834, Howell, MI 48843 SHAREWARE System Option Editor is SHAREWARE. If you find this program, valuable, and useful, please REGISTER it by sending $15.00 + $1.00 Shipping and Handling (please add $5.00 S&H for overseas orders) to William E. Allen P.O. Box 834 Howell, Michigan 48843. DISTRIBUTION The programs are copyrighted, but you are hereby granted permis- sion to make and distribute copies for personal, non-commercial use. Use them yourself, give copies to friends and co-workers, or distribute them for a cost-based fee (of $10.00 or less) as part of a user's group or bulletin board service. If you wish to distribute these programs in connection with any other product, or for use in commercial applications, please contact us for a license agreement. All of the files that make up this product must be distribute together, in an UNMODIFIED form. The files you should have on the diskette, or in the archive are: SYSOPTED.EXE Executable program SYSOPTED.DAT Help message file. SYSOPTED.DOC This documentation. SYSOPTED.REG A registration form; COPY SYSOPTED.REG PRN INTRODUCTION SysOptEd works by creating customized AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to let you decide which startup programs to run, and which device drivers to load, when you boot your computer. You have 26 options, A through Z, to choose from and you can use any of the options in any way, and in any combination you wish. Of course you don't need to use them all. To use SysOptEd, you create two new files based on your existing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. These new files, AUTOEXEC.OPT and CONFIG.OPT, contain all of the statements you would ever want to include. Any lines that you want based on options set with SysOptEd are prefaced with one or more option letters. You can choose to have these optional lines included if the associated option is on, or if it is off. You can combine your options, using boolean logic. A SIMPLE EXAMPLE Let's say you normally use SideKick, but sometimes you want to use Ventura Publishing. VP tells you not to run SK, so you want to reboot your machine without it. Here is what you might do: Rename AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOEXEC.OPT and modify it as follows. Lets say that your AUTOEXEC.BAT file has the following lines: PATH C:\;C:\DOS PROMPT $P$G CD \SK SK CD \ CLS Create an AUTOEXEC.OPT file that looks like this: PATH C:\;C:\DOS PROMPT $P$G S CD \SK S SK CD \ CLS Now that you've created your AUTOEXEC.OPT file, use SysOptEd to generate the proper AUTOEXEC.BAT file. To load the program, type "SYSOPTED", press Enter, and follow the instructions on the screen. Press F1 to read the context sensitive help screens. They contain all the information you'll need to know to successfully operate SysOptEd. When you have made your option choices, press either F3 or F4 and SysOptEd will update your AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS files. If you press F4, SysOPtEd will offer to reboot your computer so your new choices will take effect. If you choose the S option (presumably for Sidekick in our example), all six lines would be included in your AUTOEXEC.BAT. If you set the S option off, only the four lines not prefaced with the S would be included. AUTOEXEC.OPT AND CONFIG.OPT Here are the simple rules you need to know to create your AUTOEXEC.OPT and CONFIG.OPT files. Begin each line with your option letter(s) starting in the first position (i.e. column 1). Use upper case option letters if you want the line included when the option is on, and use lower case if you want the line included when the option is off. If you want a line to always be included, leave at least one blank or tab in front of it. The leading white space will be removed when the line is generated into your AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS file. You can list as many option letters as you want. Separate them with the vertical bar (|) if you want to logically OR the options or separate them with an ampersand (&) if you want to logically AND the options. Don't leave any space, or other characters, between them. The line: A|B echo A or B selected will be included if either option A OR option B is on, and The line: A&B echo A and B selected will be included only if both A AND B are on. Here is another example: A&b|C echo (A AND NOT B) OR C is selected Please be careful when you experiment. If you press F3 or F4 when you exit SysOptEd, it will write new AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files in the root directory of the drive where it found the *.OPT files. Pressing F4 will ask if you want to reboot. You can press ESC to exit SysOptEd without updating your files. Of course you can safely experiment by temporarily using a drive other than your boot drive. A COMPLETE EXAMPLE Here is a complete example of SysOptEd based on my own AUTOEXEC and CONFIG files. I use the exact same copy of AUTOEXEC.OPT and CONFIG.OPT on my IBM PS/2 Model 70 at work, where we use the IBM Token Ring network, as I do on my IBM/AT at home. These two systems are vastly different, yet, using SysOptEd, I only have to keep one set of system files up to date. First, here is how I have my options set up in SysOptEd: A: N: IBM Token Ring Network B: Print Buffer O: √ C: Disk Cache P: Turbo Debug 386 √ D: DESQview Q: √ E: Expanded Memory √ R: RAM Disk F: S: Serial Printer G: T: Tape Backup/Restore H: U: I: V: J: W: Windows K: Keyboard Mod X: 80386 CPU L: Y: √ M: Mouse Z: Here is what my AUTOEXEC.OPT file looks like: @echo off cls echo AUTOEXEC: Sample cd \System SysOptEd /A T TAPEBACK.BAT K KBMOD S MODE LPT2=COM2 S MODE COM2:9600,N,8,1,P C&X C:\PCKwik\SUPERPCK /s:1024 /t:16 /o+ /q+ /p- C&x C:\PCKwik\SUPERPCK /em /t:8 /o+ /q+ /p- C&B C:\PCKwik\PCKSPL /k- /x:3,3 /o:5 /v- /q- /p- C cls N cd \Net N NET start rdr ALLEN /srv:3 /asg:16 /nbs:512 N Signon /N=ALLEN N cd \System N cls M&X C:\DV\LoadHI C:\Mouse\MOUSE.COM M&x C:\Mouse\MOUSE M set Mse=REM m set Mse=C:\Mouse\MOUSE R set Tmp=G: N set Pth=C:\;C:\DOS;C:\NET n set Pth=C:\;C:\DOS path %Pth% prompt $p » D DESQview.BAT W Windows.BAT cd \ cls And finally, here is what my CONFIG.OPT file looks like: Files=32 c Buffers=16 C Buffers=4 N Lastdrive=Z Stacks=0,0 Shell=C:\DOS\Command.com C:\DOS /p /e:256 P&X Device=C:\TD\TDH386.sys D&x Device=C:\DV\QExt.sys E&X&N Device=C:\DV\QEMM.sys ram frame=c000 exclude=da00-dfff E&X&n Device=C:\DV\QEMM.sys ram frame=c000 E&x Device=C:\System\EMM.sys AT D000 258 MC R&C Device=C:\PCKwik\PCKRamD.sys /s:2560 R&c Device=C:\DOS\VDisk.sys 3008 512 64 /e:2 N Device=C:\NET\DxmA0Mod.sys N Device=C:\NET\DxmC0Mod.sys N Device=C:\NET\DxmT0Mod.sys As you can see, I have a lot of flexibility. Of particular note, take a look at my CONFIG.OPT file. You'll see that I'm using QuarterDeck's QEMM.SYS on my 386 system (X) when I ask for expanded memory (E), and I generate the line differently depending on whether or not I'm loading the network (N). Also notice that when I ask for a ram disk (R) I use Multisoft's PC-Kwik device driver, but if I am not loading the PC-Kwik disk cache (C) I use VDISK instead. And notice how I change the buffers statement depending on the disk cacheing too. In my AUTOEXEC.OPT file I set an environment variable, %Mse%, depending on whether I load the mouse driver globally (M), or not (m). If I load the driver globally, I set Mse=REM, and if it is not loaded, I set Mse=C:\Mouse\Mouse. Now I can use a batch file something like this: %Mse% cd \Whatever Program that uses the mouse %Mse% off to run my programs that use the mouse. They work whether I load the mouse drive globally or not. LOCATION OF FILES SysOptEd will look first in the current directory and then follow your PATH to locate your AUTOEXEC.OPT and CONFIG.OPT files. The AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS files are always written to the root directory of the drive where SysOptEd finds AUTOEXEC.OPT and CONFIG.OPT. If no AUTOEXEC.OPT file is found, your AUTOEXEC.BAT file will not be updated or created. Similarly, if no CONFIG.OPT file is found, SysOptEd does not update or create a CONFIG.SYS file. In other words, you can use SysOptEd for one or the other if you wish. You don't have to use it for both your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS if you don't want to. COMMAND-LINE PARAMETERS Here are some command-line parameters you can use instead of SysOptEd's interactive mode. This is handy if you want to make a batch file to set your system up in a certain way. X+ (X can be any letter A..Z) followed by a plus sign to turn an option on. X- Turn option X off. X* Toggles option X. /Sn Saves current options, in an option set like S from the option menu. /Ln Loads option set n where n is 0 through 9. /C Clear all options. /A (for autoexec) command-line parameter will make the program start up conditionally, depending on the state of the CapsLock key. Make "SysOptEd /A" the first statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file and you can change system options whenever you boot up by pressing the CapsLock key quickly after you hear the post (Power-On-Self-Test) "beep". /R Reboot the system with the new options. /R+ Reboot without asking. I use the command line when I run my tape backup software. It doesn't seem to get along with any TSR programs loaded, so I run it by starting a batch file called TAPEBACK.BAT. It looks something like this: SysOptEd /C T+ /R SysOptEd, clears all of my options (/C), selects option T (T+), and then reboots (/R). This generates an AUTOEXEC.BAT with a few lines I always include, followed by a call to another batch file called TAPABACK.BAT. TAPEBACK.BAT looks something like this: @echo off cd \Tools TAPE cd \System SysOptEd /L0 /R+ When my backups are finished, the batch file calls SysOptEd to reload my default options (/L0), and reboot the computer. SOME OTHER INFORMATION * SysOptEd stores your option descriptions and current choices in a file called SYSOPT.DAT. It will first look in the current directory, and then in the directories listed in your PATH for the file. If it does not locate SYSOPT.DAT, it will create it in the current directory. The date and time stamp on this file will not change after it is created, even when you change options, although the archive bit will be set to reflect that the file has been updated. * When SysOptEd creates your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, it sets their date and time stamp the same as the correspond- ing .OPT file. * SysOptEd recognizes certain environments, such as DESQview, Windows and Software Carousel. When running under DESQview or Windows, it will not allow you to reboot the system when you press F4. Instead, it displays a message and ends. It is also well-behaved in the DESQview environment, writing to a DESQview shadow buffer instead of directly to the screen. SysOptEd, when running in a Software Carousel partition, will pass the reboot request to Carousel, and Carousel will display its usual "Are you sure?" message for confirmation. * When SysOptEd generates a line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file that contains the characters ".BAT", it will not generate any more lines after that. It assumes that line calls another batch file and will not return. Please send comments and questions to: William E. Allen, CIS ID [75300,272], or to EZ-SoftWare, P.O. Box 834, Howell MI 48843. Thank you for registering SysOptEd.