DOS 5.0 for the 286 and 6.22 for the 386 and 486. I don't play too many games so the 2gb isn't an issue.

smeezekitty wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

Meh I just prefer to use Windows 98SE for the most part. The only DOS machine I have currently is my IBM PCjr and that uses IBM DOS 2.1. 😜

Yeah 95/98 is nice but sometimes you need to boot pure DOS.

Also for low RAM 486 and 386 class systems will not run 9x satisfactorily

Yeah when I eventually find one of those machines I will certainly be using DOS, as of yet I don't own one yet though. 😜

Adding some info on the FreeDOS defrag application, proposed in this post
Re: OS of choice survey (DOS).

I got to play for the first time with 7.1 just now on a pure DOS system because I needed space (=FAT32). My OCD immediately kicked in and missed my beloved Norton Speed Disk (such utilities were the main reason for sticking to 6.22 until now). First though was to search for later Norton versions, but it turned out that the first version supporting FAT32 (NU for Win95 v2) has no command line Speed Disk.

So I researched a bit on the aforementioned defrag utility. First of all, the "latest" version shown here http://www.nongnu.org/free-defrag/ is 1.3.1.
In FreeDOS' software list 1.3.2 is listed which can be obtained by following the "Alternate site" link, the others still list up to 1.3.1. I don't know the differences or the importance (if any), but the two releases are two years apart so I got the newest.

But that's when problems start. The util refuses to run being smart and stating that it "won't run under Windows". Yeah, plain reported version checking. This can be overcomed by adding the defrag.exe to SETVER.EXE's table. But SETVER is neither in the WINDOWS\COMMAND, WINDOWS\COMMAND\EBD or installation cdrom's OLDMSDOS folder. One has to get it directly from the C:\WINDOWS dir (or manually extract it from the .CAB files, didn't bother to look which one in particular since I had such an installation to get the file from).

Note: this is also the location of IFSHLP.SYS and DBLBUFF.SYS in case anyone was searching them just to get rid of the startup "file not found" errors, although completely unnecessary for a pure DOS environment. They can be copied to wherever WinDir=... and WinBootDir=... point in MSDOS.SYS

After SETVER is set up, LOCK command is also needed before running defrag, "Windows" by default have direct access disabled to prevent corruption by applications potentially not knowing how to handle FAT32, LFN etc.

At least eventually it works fine and looks like the best defrag solution for 7.1, since it also has the "looks" 😉

I use Dos 6.22 and WfW 3.11 on my 486 computer, my Pentium 200 MMX box I havent decided on what it will run yet but probably Windows 95.
My Pentium 2 350 runs Windows 98SE (this box is about to be rebuilt from the ground with a Athlon 500), My Pentium 3 1GHz runs Windows ME.

The 2GB limit doesnt really hamper me on my 486 as the bios only supports 2GB drives maximum and I was only just starting to run into space issues with the 1.2GB Bigfoot drive that I only recently replaced with a 2GB Compact Flash drive.

286/12->MS Dos 5.0a/Win 3.1 at the moment but plan to throw DrDos 6 on it for old time sake.
386DX25->MS Dos 6.xx/Wfw 3.11
486DX2/66s->OS/2 Warp v3, MS Dos 6.xx/WfW 3.11 with the possibility of one getting Linux and NT 3.51 installed.
P200mmx->Linux
Have a number of Super Socket sytems with OSs vary from Win95/Win98/NT4/W2k.
Celeron 400->Win 98(MS Dos 7.1) orig. with USB mass storage support. Had OS/2 v4(still have the hdd in storage) on it for a bit but Win 98 runs much better on it.

Wouldn't touch FreeDos with a barge pole, some of the utils in the project are handy though. Re OS/2 stability, it all depended on your set up. On one box I had an OS/2 v3 that would lock up all the time. It was fine running dos & wfw.

sliderider wrote:

OS/2. More stable than DOS or Windows.

Dos is more stable than OS/2 any day of the week due to it's single tasking nature. NT based Windows easily matched OS/2 on good hardware.

sliderider wrote:

Also, if you get a red box version of OS/2, it will work with whatever version of Windows you have installed.

Only Windows 3.1x. Now take off that tinfoil hat will you. Then it can be hit n miss depending on how customised you're Win 3.x installation is. This is from experience. You're better off installing Blue Spine with win-os2 incorporated if you want Win 3.x support in OS/2 v3. Same applies to OS/2 v3 Connect.

Caluser2000 wrote:

sliderider wrote:

OS/2. More stable than DOS or Windows.

Dos is more stable than OS/2 any day of the week due to it's single tasking nature. NT based Windows easily matched OS/2 on good hardware.

😲 I've seen countless misbehaved apps with DOS extenders, real mode TSR's, and EMM/QEMM "events" render DOS completely unusable. OS/2 was heads and tails more resilient to misbehaved apps than DOS.

To compare NT to OS/2 is a bit anachronistic as OS/2 2.x was the only option for a viable preemptive OS before NT could make that claim.

This coming from someone who ran a multi line BBS on DOS and knew all too well the options (or lack thereof) at the time

My two active retro rigs (Pentium MMX and Pentium III) have been setup as DOS 6.22+Windows 3.11 / Windows 95 / Windows 98 multiboot machines. Basically, I don't choose. I have them all together. 🤣