whitney@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (glen whitney) (08/25/87)
I am currently using MS-DOS 3.20, and I would like to know if it is worth upgrading to PC-DOS 3.3. Assuming that the price is not a factor, what advantages and disadvantages does PC-DOS 3.3 have over MS-DOS 3.20? Any physical problems (such as having to reformat a hard disk and many floppies) are not important to me. Thanks for your help. Wayne Whitney -- whitney@husc4.harvard.edu (ARPANET) whitney@husc4.UUCP (UUCP) ..!harvard!husc4!whitney (also UUCP) 72770,2020 (CIS) "You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
cy@ashtate (Cy Shuster) (08/26/87)
In article <2755@husc6.UUCP> whitney@husc4.UUCP (glen whitney) writes: > > I am currently using MS-DOS 3.20, and I would like to know if it is >worth upgrading to PC-DOS 3.3. There are a handful of new features which have been pretty well discussed: being able to "call" batch files (and have them return properly to the caller), the ability to suppress any line from echoing by preceding with an "@" sign, some improvements to xcopy (automatic creation of subdirectories with /S -- unless that's already in 3.2?). There are two performance features which have not been widely discussed: FASTOPEN and IBMCACHE.SYS. FASTOPEN is a resident program, which takes a disk drive as an argument from the command line. I don't know what it does: buffers the FAT, maybe. IBMCACHE.SYS is a disk cache, with a configurable size. It may not actually be part of DOS 3.3: on the PS/2s, it is supplied on the demonstration disk along with the diagnostics and "Learning the PS/2". It, uh, seems happy on my AT, though... And now the down side: the press has had reports of people collecting a variety of bugs in it. From what I read, seemed like even more than 3.2 and its equal size collection of DISKCOPY patches. But my own experience with it for the last several months has been great - no problems at all. Guess you can't believe everything you see in the press ;-)! (please, no coupons from the Oracle ad!) --Cy-- cy@ashtate.CSS.GOV ...!seismo!scgvaxd!ashtate!cy
dsd@hpsadla.HP (Donald St. Denis (x4489)) (08/27/87)
There's an article explaining the modifications/additions/... in PCDOS 3.3 in "PCResource" vol #6, 9/87. I got mine in the mail, I don't know if it's on the news stands. About 3.3 (according to article): - supports 720K and 1.44M drives - extends HD capacity to 128M by allowing multiple DOS partitions (not quite sure what this means) - APPEND to search paths for all kinds of files (instead of just COM, EXE, or BAT) - ATTRIB file attributes. - changes to BACKUP, RESTORE, DATE and TIME ... This is just a part of the article. I don't have any idea how accurate the article is, I use 3.1 myself. Good Luck.