Some of my customers recently wished to change their Windows 98 for Windows ME ; though I think it is mainly a gadget, and though it is obviously not a professional solution, they did so. Now I must find a way to have MS-DOS applications running under Windows ME.
There are 4 problems encountered, mainly because Windows ME deletes anything it finds in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT :
1 – The number of simultaneously opened files – solved using a directive line in SYSTEM.INI to replace the missing FILES=… directive (information found at Microsoft’s online technical database), but even now, nothing about BUFFERS=… which I found very helpful in avoiding program locking while reindexing large files.
2 – The amount of conventional memory ; since EMM386.EXE can’t be launched anymore for the reason above, there are about 580 K bytes left, which can be sufficient in most cases using overlays, but can be just too short in certain circumstances.
3 – The most annoying up to now : the keyboard is not configured correctly. I guess it’s not a problem for american users, but for others (french, here), the ALT-GR key is disabled, so it becomes impossible to obtain any useful characters, such as ~,#,{,[,|,`,\,^,@,] and }. Well, not all so useful, but at least |,\ and @ are ! Using ALT + ASCII codes remains a solution, but a bit uncomfortable…
By the way, I’d be pleased if anyone knows how to stop Windows ME from touching the startup files (and by the way, any others, as it deletes some old system programs that for sure are not useful anymore, but I dont like the idea for an OS deleting things that the user should have wished to put on his hard disk, for example a temporary backup from another computer, etc.)
