Experience with DOS 7.10?

[criticalmass]

I stumbled over this while looking around for diferent ways to mess up my machine: A Microsoft DOS version that's supposed to run with NT4 and even XP ?

Interesting. But I don't want to mess up my machine that much, so I'm asking the OS wizards around here first, if anybody has some experience with it.

From the rather sparse description, it sounds nice (long filename support, USB support, FAT32X & NTFS support, XXMS,... - but also statements like "Many undocumented but useful options and switches added"), but you know how it is with shiny exteriors.

 

[AKAImBatman]

Now THIS is hilarious! "Screenshots of DOS! HOT!" LOL!

As I understand it, this is just DOS extracted from the Windows 9x series. Microsoft updated DOS to handle all the new features of Windows (e.g. long file names, FAT32, etc.) when they first moved to Windows 95. This was required since DOS was used as the 9x bootloader. Basically, there's nothing new here.

However, the DOS boot disks/ISO might be of use for old games, but I'm not really sure how legal these downloads are. Traditionally Microsoft hasn't cared too much (since they managed to soak everyone for DOS at least once), but I figured I'd point it out.

 

[Worf]

Actually, Win9x still uses DOS for a lot of things. So Win9x's and ME's DOS was more than just a bootloader. It was used to handle many operations that Windows won't handle by itself.

Notably, there was no floppy disk driver in 9x. What happened when you access the floppy drive was that 9x would drop down to DOS (which it subverted into running in v86 mode) for the floppy. The DOS floppy code then accessed the BIOS, which did the actual disk reading. The end result was that the OS stutters when you access the floppy as the entire machine stops multitasking to access DOS and the BIOS.

This also applies for devices that have real-mode drivers attached to them - again, 9x would call into DOS to handle the driver access. If you happen to have a hard drive that the BIOS doesn't fully support, 9x would also use it in "compatibility" mode - you really need a translating BIOS to convince Windows that it can use its protected-mode drivers to access the hard disk.

It's interesting how 9x works - it boots into DOS, then the Windows kernel takes over, and moves DOS into v86 mode, which it runs in a private DOS box to handle calls that Windows won't handle.

Other OS'es merely use DOS as a bootloader - e.g., loadlin, in which case DOS is replaced by the OS. But 9x was still DOS-based as ever.

 

[cff]

I also have my doubts about the legality of that DOS version. Besides that I cannot really comment much on it. I have it installed on my machine and didn't notice any differences to 6.22 that are worth mentioning. It DOES come with more useful utilities like a norton commander ish program, as well as several valuable (generic) drivers. Only reason I have it is FAT32 support. Cannot say if everything works flawlessly as I pretty much never used it anymore since I started using DOSBOX.