(Excerpts from a message dated 11-11-99, Linda Proulx to Andy Roberts)

Hi Linda--

 AR> spec, feature, price and source as they upgrade piece by piece.  They
 AR> almost never buy any device without a very good reason and plan for
 AR> it's use to perform something new that their present obsolete system

LP>How about a 10 year old?

    The longest that I have had a hardware system live is almost 12
years between birth and death.  And it was a top-of-the-line system when
it was new: an IBM PS/2 model 80.  (I came very close to violating the
"don't be the first kid on the block with a new system" rule when I
bought that one!)

    I read somewhere (I think it was "Science" magazine, but I am not
sure) that CMOS circuits slowly deteriorate with usage, and most desktop
computers have a 10-year design life.  So have an escape path set up for
when your ancient machine gives you the "replace system unit" warning
during POST and refuses to boot :-(.

    At the moment, the oldest running system in the house is my wife's
vintage-1993 PS/VP 433DX (32 MB RAM, about 800 MB in two hard drives),
which she "inherited" from my office closet when the PS/2 died!  For
obvious reasons, she is also running Warp 4 FixPak 5.  Both machines
have only one primary partition, because neither of us boots any other
operating system from the hard drive.  Neither machine has Win-OS2
installed.  All hard-drive partitions on both machines are formatted
HPFS.  Both machines have an attached, parallel-port Iomega 100 MB Zip
drive, used for archiving and backup.  The contents of the two boot
partitions (one on each of the two machines) are not identical, but each
has been pared down to where it can be backed up to a single Zip
diskette.

    But her partitioning and desktop layout are completely different
than mine, because she runs an entirely different set of applications.
Her most-used applications are DOS programs: PAF (Personal Ancestral
Files) v 2.31, WordPerfect 6.1 for DOS, and German Assistant 5 (a
language translation program).  She has had no trouble whatsoever
running these programs in OS/2 VDMs.  None of the DOS applications, in
either machine, was installed using the OS/2 "migrate" procedure.  The
WordPerfect pair of manuals includes an appendix explaining how to
install it under OS/2 v 2.0 or later; all other DOS applications were
set up by trial and error, and I built the desktop "Program Objects" for
these DOS programs.  Just goes to show you that under OS/2, one size
does not fit all :-).

    Are you really sure that you need Boot Manager and more than one
primary partition?  If the only reason you want to boot real DOS is to
play some DOS games that violate the OS/2 system-integrity rules,
investigate the OS/2 Virtual Boot Machine, which allows you to boot any
version of DOS you want from a floppy.  (See the section on Virtual Boot
Machines in your copy of "Unleashed.")  A VBM DOS can read HPFS
partitions while you are actually running under "real" DOS, not under
OS/2.  I suggest that you try this before allowing DOS a permanent
berth, with all the grief that entails.  If it works, it would be a much
better solution than being forced to live with 1 GB FAT partitions!!

    Good luck,

        --Murray

___
 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * If you are not confused, you don't understand the
situation

--- Maximus/2 2.02