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 @ ! Using ALT + ASCII codes remains a solution, but a bit uncomfortable…
4 – A strange bug I also found with Windows 2000 (at the beginning, I thought i was just a problem with the laptops LCD displays, becauseI first encountered the problem on a Toshiba with Windows 2000) : The MS-DOS prompt window is displayed normally, but any shortcut you create for an MS-DOS application causes the program to be displayed in the 25 first lines of a 50 lines display ! In full screen mode, that makes a “half screen mode” !!! And no way to correct the problem : the icon’s properties show “25 lines display” !
