Batboard

I HAVE A LAPTOP RUNNING DOS 6.22 WITH MTSX AND MCS DOS SOFTWARE. IS IT OK TO INSTALL WINDOWS 98 ON THE SAME MACHINE I USE TO PROGRAM MY RADIOS WITH THE DOS SOFTWARE? CAN ANY DAMAGE OCCUR TO THE RADIO? I HAVE HEARD ITS NOT A GOOD IDEA, JUST WANT TO CLARIFY


THANKS

If you install Windows 98 as a dual-boot configuration, you'll be alright...BUT...you must use DOS to program your radios. Using a DOS box sometimes works, but sometimes not. Pure DOS is what you want.

If you can dual boot the system, that's the best way. Otherwise, you can load the computer with Win98 and then use the "MS-DOS mode for Games with EMS & XMS Support" icon located in the "C:\Windows" directory. This will cause the computer to reboot into a real DOS mode that works wonderfully. You can even hard-boot the computer in this mode & it'll reboot back into DOS. The only way to get out of it is to type "exit" at the prompt & it'll then reboot into Windows. I've programmed literally thousands of radios of all different types in this manner.

Todd

What we did on our company XP machines is made a small - ~100 MB FAT32 partition, and a dos boot CD. The corporate IT gurus wouldn't go for a dual boot config. You just boot from the CD, and all you see is the small partition as C:. Up until recently, we had everything from Syntor, to MSF, to Spectra, to maratrac to maxtrac to program. This worked fine with IBM T23's and X40's.
At our shop alone, we actually have four of every disk for every RSS on the laptops. Most of the disks from M were never even opened, as the machines were loaded from an image - but they have a subscription for every tech's machine.

Now we're mostly MTS / MCS CPS, but we've still got a few orphans.