Re: Problems Running DOS on a Dell?


See at end....

On Mon, 1 May 2006, Paul Bartlett wrote:

Slightly OT, in that this is not strictly about MS-DOS as such.

At one time I had a good (but no-brand) computer on which I had
partitioned the hard disk and had DR-DOS 7.03 running without problems. Unfortunately, a power supply failure turned most of the machine into a
boat anchor. Because I was poor and could not afford to replace it, a
friend gave me an old Dell OptiPlex GXpro which has a sticker on it
"Designed for Microsoft Windows 95." (I actually put Win98 on it.)

In time I partitioned the drive and put DR-DOS 7.03 in a bootable
partition. However, I kept running into frequent instances in which I
would quit an application and go back to the command prompt and the
system was completely frozen. Not even Ctl-Alt-Del would work. There
was nothing I could do but press the reset button. Eventually this got
frustrating, so I let it alone.

Earlier today I read an off-topic post in another newsgroup in
which a poster made a passing remark about DOS and Dells, as if the two
were not always compatible (at least in Dell's most recent
incarnations). This machine has a Phoenix BIOS, although without a
hard reboot I don't recall the version number. Has anyone else had any
experiences in running a DOS on a Dell and had problems? Thanks.

--
Paul Bartlett


My experiences involve about 35-40 machines (PCs of all types, used & new, 386s and up). Here is my synopsis of the general kind of thing that you might be dealing with. Something, somewhere, somehow in the motherboard breaks down or opens up and some detail of functionality may be lost. It can be that none of your software can communicate with the modem. Or, I have one box where in windows 3.1 I cannot click on "DOS" for a dos window without the box freezing up (however, all other DOS, Win3.1, and Win98 [on a dual boot installation] work fine). I've had a few of these problems appear sometimes on old boxes. Replacing ALL of the peripherals AND ribbon cables does NOT fix the problem, but all of the peripherals and ribbon cables work fine in other boxes. I have no had three experiences where everything on a new box I got worked fine, then I decided to pull out the Win-modem and replace it with a regular modem and then something or a trace on the motherboard, because of bending? stress? whatever?, cracks and then lots of things don't work (including modem communication, boot up, etc).

I'm on a DELL Optiplex GXMT 5166 (160 mHz) now, running DOS, Win3.1, 98SE all just fine. Even had Linux on it at one time in the past.

Now, I'll tell you what I am hearing as a tangent and rumor: lots of the new hardware coming out will only load WinXP. One of my friends bought a new laptop with XP on it. He didn't like XP, tried to reinstall Win98 and even DOS and Win3.1 and the computer would not boot up at all or would not run the software. He had to put XP back on. Another Microsoft trick to force people to buy with XP and not be able to use any other OS? Or, force manufacturers to put hardware together that will only ever boot XP? Another story from another guy said the same thing. Then, you read the box for XP and it says "for the best experience, buy XP preinstalled" and I've heard of guys having trouble getting XP to install on a white box. Lots of the newest OSes (even Linux) have much more serious hardware specification and some older hardware conflicts with the new OSes. My advice: maybe take care of your old boxes and don't touch anything if you don't have to if you want to keep on truckin'. Me, I'm even not touching modems any more, and if a modem I have is starting to give me trouble, I look for an external modem and put it on a different com port & different IRQ instead of yanking the old modem out of the motherboard. And, then, if you have two modems (I've got one box with internal and external modems) hooked to the same computer, sometimes some of the software locks up (Win98 on that box wont dial up my ISP any more, but DOS-Telix still works).


.