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Hi all,
Am new to this BasicLinux forum.

I am going to weigh in my own 2cents on this longer
question.  

> I have a super low-grade near-identical replacement 
> PC for her.  It is a Pentium 133MHz CPU with 32MG 
> SRAM and a 1.6GB hdd.  This already has 
> DOS 6.2 and WS4.0 already installed via floppies 
> only, onto a 500MB "C:" partition and a 1GB "D:" 
> data partition.

The bottom-line is that the lady should get what she
wants, but should also have some flexibilty for any
new needs.  
For hardware, a larger capacity disk on this
rejuvenated PC should help with reliability and
backups.  Given that the wordstar processor and
printing are important, the data on the PC is much
more critical than any other extras that you would try
to get to work with DOS or BL3.

> Question here is whether it would be better 
> carrying out the above on a larger 6GB+ hdd 
> (i.e., faster, more reliable) and setting up
> a a) dual-boot DOS/BL3 system with WS4.O on 
> the DOS partition and BL3 running from the 
> loop file on "C:" -or- b) a wiping out DOS 
> altogether and running WS4.0 from dosemu in a 
> fully-installed BL3 ??

No question that it is a) using BL 3.50 for DOS in a
loop file.

Keep the entire environment exactly as it was before,
as far as this lady knows.  With the hidden option of
booting into BL3 via the loop file, you yourself have
the benefit of running this BasicLinux for anything
you need to perform on this system that DOS utilities
or antiquated add-ons provide less efficiently.  You
can always go back to this lady in the future and show
her how to use JOE if she has any inclination to do so
----- probably unlikely.  Remember the acronym KISS.

If its any hard disk larger than 2GB, you should
maximize the DOS C: partitions at about 1015-1020MB
with FDISK to make sure that you your fat16 cluster
size is 16kB once formatted with FORMAT.
You would then create an extended partition covering
most of the rest of the disk, and then make similarly
sized partitions D: E: F: ...  
D: for documents only amd E:, F:, ...would be used
solely for backup of DOS itself, the wordstar install
directory, a directory of other application backups,
and directories of the critical wordstar documents.   

again, you definitely do NOT want to wipe DOS off this
:O
dw



       
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