I haven't used 4.x or 5.0, but I've been using version 5.5 for many months now with no similar crashing. I use it in DOSBox, a Sempron Win98 rig and an MMX DOS 7.1 rig. I use NC like I use Midnight Commander in Linux - a lot - for viewing, editing, copying, moving and renaming. When you "disabled" QEMM, did you make sure all changes to your autoexec.bat and config.sys had been reverted?
What is your total memory and what your memory usage without QEMM? What kind of files are you viewing when it crashes? Which DOS are you using? Have you tried booting a DOS 6.x boot disk?

Every single one of my machines have some sort of NC (5.5 generally) installed on them. Back in the days, I used many versions of it starting from 1992. During that times a machine without NC was something unimaginable for me. And I never have any memories of it being crashed, let alone regularly. You probably have some other problem.

Keep in mind that NC viewers are for files from that time. Although NC 5.5 can view Excel files, maybe it won't work with modern (i.e.: Excel 2003) files.

I have NC 5.5, and it never crashed.

I used NC4 and NC5 extensively back in the day and never had any problems whatsoever with crashing.

That being said, quite a few years ago I migrated/updated to NC5.5 and noticed a severe bug with it's internal text file editor (F4) when saving the edited text file (F2).

The majority of the time the internal text editor would TOTALLY corrupt the edited text file when saving it (it usually would delete a lot of the text in the file). I've noticed this behavior with NC running under a variety of PCs and OSs... native DOS, W98SE, WXP, and even under DOSBox for PC, as well as DOSBox Turbo for my Android tablet.

I STILL extensively use the NC text editor even today on my Android tablet and modern PCs. So, my workaround was to simply use NC50's text file editor, simply copying and overwriting the files "NCEDIT.EXE" and "NCEDIT.MSG" in my NC55 installation with the older NC5 versions of the files.

rfnagel wrote:

I STILL extensively use the NC text editor even today on my Android tablet and modern PCs.
So, my workaround was to simply use NC50's text file editor, simply copying and overwriting the files "NCEDIT.EXE" and "NCEDIT.MSG"
in my NC55 installation with the older NC5 versions of the files.

Similar here. :) I'm using NC's built-in text viewer/editor whenever I read old ASCII files from the DOS age.
Especially if they use code page 437 or contain schematics of do-it-yourself stuff (Covox clones, radio interfaces, etc.)
However, I'm not using that new-ish NCEDIT. Just good ol' Norton Commander from 1986.

the norton stuff always seemed very speed sensitive to me.

Back in the day NC 5.0 did a nice litle thing, that it moved and copied files, but files were broken or 0 size.
But i really can not remember how.

But i have been usin Volkov Commander 4.05 and love it.

On some later machines, I have got several issues with NC (4/5). Seems that it is more speed-sensitive than VolkovCommander.
I like the fact, that Volkov can swith to the command-line by pressing "esc". That's very handy. On the other hand, the built-in
editior in Volkkov does not support deleting complete lines with "F8", that's a bit of an advantage for the NC.

btw. the later vc5x supports long filenames, but I have not tested this. on win3x/95 i use TotalCommander 3x on small machines.

I haven't experienced any troubles with NC 4/5/5.5 on any machines. No file corruption, no crashes at F3... It looks like a hardware problem or software incompatibility. Try to start DOS in safe mode (via F8 on "Starting MS-DOS..." label) and run NC Viewer again.

No issues with NC5.5 here but I don't use it all that much.

I use NC 5.0 on both DOS and Win 98 rig and i never had a crash caused by it and even if it would crash, you would be dropped back to DOS prompt. I suggest checking your memory sticks, or as it was mentioned previously, check NC with pure DOS (no drivers, no config.sys options changed).

NC2000 is for Win9x and it supports LFN, but it's slow compared to NC5/5.5 Dos.
I would never use NC4x/5x within Win9x.

0kool wrote:

- I understand NC5.x was a substantial upgrade from version 4 - both in terms of the size and options. Does anyone remember the details and the experience with Norton Commander 4?

I didn't have any problems with NC4 and NC5, with QEMM or not.

I used 5.5 very shortly and found it unstable. It supports LFNs (if supported by the OS, e.g. Win9x) but it crashed or misbehaved too often on my machine.

Azarien wrote:

I used 5.5 very shortly and found it unstable.

It is abnormal. 😀 I didn't experienced any problems, crashes, bugs on 386DX-40/64KB cache/4MB/500MB FAT16/DOS 6.22.

NC 5.0 also a good version, I have installed it on PentiumMMX-200 with Win98 and FAT32. No problems...

I'm curious, how does speed affect NC4/5 ? 😕
I have been using NC 1.x for ages and never encountered any speed issues.
The fastest system I had it running on (natively) was a Pentium IV at ~3GHz.

I'm running NC 5.0 in Virtual PC 2007 running on i3-3220. There are no problems (unlike Windows 95 which is working very unstable without patches).

NC is a simple program, it should not be affected by CPU speed.

I just found yesterday that NC doesn't like some XMS managers. I was trying a couple of the popular alternatives to optimize the conventional ram on my MMX rig. I was just about to settle on QHIMEM and had it going, happy with the mem /c/p output; but when I started NC 5.5 to view a file it spit an error "Unable to open the viewer" and F4 to edit a file just did nothing. After trying a few options with QHIMEM, I switched back to HIMEMX and NC works perfectly again. I didn't try NC while testing QEMM 8.03 or JEMMEX. It did work with QEMM 7.04