POS in DOS

[RollerBall]

I got hold of an old Dell Optiplex PI 200 with only 16MB RAM the other day and set POS up running in Win98. Obviously with only limited memory Windows is not that impressive so I thought why bother with it.

Set the PC up with MS-DOS 6.22, dusted off my old DOS coding and did an autoexec file that installed the CD-ROM and then started DHPOS and what a difference. POS starts in a few seconds and runs great. Plugged in an Epson dot matrix receipt printer and it worked straight away (yippee).

Only thing I found is that when it does its first print at start-up, while it's printing it comes up with the screen message that it has hung because it can't print in DOS. Actually I found it did that as well in Win98 so it isn't strictly a DOS problem. Anyway, after that it prints normally so no worries but any ideas anyone why it gives that spurious error message??

But the main message is that you don't need Windows if you want to save yourself (or someone else) a bit of money. The system works exactly the same in DOS (as we all knew anyway - but it's good to prove it...) and because the load on the system is a lot less, you can run in DOS on very low end systems and still get very respectable performance.

[Dale Harris]

RollerBall,

The only way to have the error message display when the computer hangs up is to always display the message first, then print something, then clear the message when printing is finished.

Obviously if the computer hangs up first it cannot then display a message telliing you why it has stopped.

Ususally the time from displaying the message to clearing it is so short that you will not notice the message but in this case it takes a bit longer.

[RollerBall]

Thanks Dale - wondered if it might be something like that because on faster systems I've noticed a short green flash on POS startup and never knew what it was.

PS

With this system running POS in Win 98, had the same message but after I'd installed the generic, text only printer drivers I don't think it appeared.

PPS

what are you doing posting at 3.18am anyway - can't sleep thinking about program updates or something