hargrove@asc.slb.com (Jim Hargrove) (06/19/91)
I installed DOS 5.0 yesterday. I had a problem with himem.sys that I thought
I would pass on in case others had the same problem.
I am running on a Dell System 310. That's an old 20 MHz 386. I have 8MB of
RAM, and two hard disks. The second disk is a SCSI drive. I don't know how
much of this configuration is important. I am running win3.
The installation of 5.0 went very smoothly. After the upgrade, I simply
rebooted and win3 came up without a hitch. Then, as I was playing around with
options, I discovered that my keyboard wouldn't work UNTIL I RAN WIN3! I have
a good friend at Dell who deals with problems like this, so I called her. She
got the DOS guru on the phone and we talked for about 30 minutes. They had
several suggestions, but none of them solved the problem.
This morning, I got around to reading the readme.txt file in the new DOS
directory. It says that if you have a Phoenix BIOS, which I do, you may need
to specify /machine:1 or /machine:8 on the device=himem.sys line. I tried
machine:1 and got the same behavior. I then tried machine:8 and voila!
The only other problem I have is with the DOSSHELL program. It keeps
complaining that I don't have the latest mouse driver installed. I certainly
have tried! I have the 5.01 release of the Logitech mouse driver. I told
DOSSHELL to use the mouse anyway, and it seems to work OK. I'm not terribly
fond of the DOSSHELL anyway. I think there are better shells around. This one
looks like a stripped down version of the PCTools shell, with cruddy colors.
I don't plan to use it much.
And finally, after I finish backing up and re-installing on the SCSI drive, I
won't have to fool with all those stupid partitions.
--
-- jwh