chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-20, 15:15:

Jorpho wrote on 2021-04-20, 05:53:

chinny22 wrote on 2021-04-19, 16:04:

The PC not doing a full reboot or win.com showing in memory I am, even double checked before posting.

The first thing I do when I get access to a Win9x machine again is to see this for myself. Alas, I have nothing handy at the moment.

Not sure what's worse, the fact you don't trust me or the fact you don't have at least 1 Win9x PC setup! I'm leaning towards the second 😉

It's not that I don't trust you (I certainly should apologize for not phrasing that better); it's that I wanted to see it for myself – considering this hasn't come up before and most especially since no one else is chiming in. And yes, things have been a mess for a while now and having a working Win9x setup has not been a priority.

So I had a look in vmware. win.com is indeed loaded in memory when you use Restart in MS-DOS Mode. And more to the point, "net start workstation" returns a different error after restarting in MS-DOS Mode than it does after rebooting with command prompt only.

I'm thinking the main thing win.com is doing there is ensuring that Windows restarts when you type "exit" (and taking up 4K of RAM that could probably be used elsewhere) and that restarting in MS-DOS mode leaves the network card in an indeterminate state. But maybe it's pointless to speculate and maybe someone else will turn up now with some documentation about how win.com specifically messes with the "net" command in this situation.

All good mate, I knew what you meant, that post was 100% done in jest.

Should point out even the shortcut method requires you to type exit to have the PC boot into windows
(quite handy when a little 4yo boy enjoys pressing the power button on a 486, dos doesn't mind so much been switched off mid boot, Windows on the other hand...)

But yeh, I've also no real idea what win.com is doing/effecting and it may even be really easy to modify the Restart in Dos Mode to behave like the shortcut.
I was happy with a shortcut so that's where my testing stopped and after 25 years it's now part of my nostalgia trip