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HAVING WINDOWS 3.X AND WINDOWS 95 AT ONCE
Are you wary about installing Windows 95 so early in the
game? Perhaps you're concerned about possible
"bugs" in the new system. It seems that
everybody and his brother is jumping on the Windows 95
bandwagon, all insisting enthusiastically that Windows 95
is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but perhaps you
are aware that it took 4 years for Windows version 3.1 to
appear on the scene and become almost universally
acclaimed as the operating system of choice, and to be
included automatically in probably 95% of all computer
systems sold...
If you followed my advice in last month's edition of this
column, then you installed Windows 95 in a separate
directory, perhaps called "C:\WIN95" instead of
the default "C:\WINDOWS". That way, you still
have the old Windows 3.x version available for use in
case some of your programs don't work properly (or maybe
not at all!) under Windows 95. I found this to be true
for several of my programs, so I'm very glad I kept my
previous version around. But there are still a couple of
things you might need to do in order to be able to
conveniently boot up under either the Old or the New.
First of all, let me point out that Windows 95 setup has
saved three files from your previous version of Windows:
COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS, before
installing the new versions. The old versions have been
renamed to COMMAND.DOS, AUTOEXEC.DOS, and CONFIG.DOS.
(All the old and new files are in your root directory.)
All Windows 95 has to do in order to boot up your old
version of Windows is to rename the current (Windows 95)
versions to something different, then rename the .DOS
files to their old names, and then restart the system.
But it needs to be told to do this. How is that
accomplished?
Well, as your computer boots up, just before showing the
graphic screen there is a brief period of time when you
see the words "Starting Windows 95"; when you
see that, you have perhaps a second or so to quickly hit
either the F8 or the F4 function key. If you hit the F8
key, then you will see a boot menu whose last choice is
"Previous version of MS-DOS". So, after
choosing that, everything necessary will be performed so
that your previous Windows version will start up. On the
other hand, if you choose option 1 from this boot menu,
then normal startup of Windows 95 will proceed. Or, if
you press the F4 function key instead, then the previous
Windows version will be chosen automatically. But all
this is predicated upon your making a modification to a
configuration file for Windows 95, called MSDOS.SYS.
You may know that MSDOS.SYS under DOS is a binary file
that contains part of the DOS system code. But under
Windows 95, MSDOS.SYS is instead an ASCII file that lets
you change the way the computer boots. This new version
is a hidden read-only system file, so in order to modify
it, you have to first make it a normal (unhidden,
non-system, non-read-only) file. You can do that as
follows: in the Start menu that pops up after you click
on the Start button, choose the "Run" option.
On the command line in the box that appears, type
attrib -s -h -r msdos.sys
Now you can use EDIT.COM or NOTEPAD.EXE, for example, to
add the lines BootMulti=1 and BootMenu=1 to the [Options]
section of the MSDOS.SYS file. Then, after saving the new
version, change MSDOS.SYS back to its original attributes
by typing
attrib +s +h +r msdos.sys
at the command prompt of the Run command.
If you do boot up your previous version of Windows after
installing Windows 95, and then take a look at your root
directory from File Manager, you will note the presence
of three new files: COMMAND.W40, AUTOEXEC.W40, and
CONFIG.W40. These are the Windows 95 files COMMAND.COM,
AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS renamed so that the Windows
3.x versions can be activated under their normal names.
Hmmmm.... Why is there that file extension
"W40"? Does this mean that the original name of
Windows 95 was Windows 4.0?
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