Gateway 2000 P5-100: Final system tweaks

Video and sound drivers

To finish up the install of all the operating systems, the video and sound drivers for the Gateway P5-100 must be installed . For Windows 95 and 98, an automatic install was made and this is not necessary.

The video and sound drivers were re-installed in Windows 3.1 as previously shown in an earlier blog entry.  Video is here and sound is here.

Installing the required drivers for the MS-DOS 6.22 partition has not been complete. I have found that the same sound driver install disk for Windows 3.1 can be used to install the DOS only drivers quite easily, but I have not found the appropriate DOS video drivers for the TRIO64 video card. However, this may not be a problem since the default 640x480 with 16 colors will most likely be fine for the DOS programs I plan to use on this system.

Optimizing MS-DOS memory

The common problem running old DOS programs from the early '80s is memory errors. MS-DOS-based programs require a certain amount of conventional memory to run, even when you run them in Windows. If you attempt to run an MS-DOS-based program that requires more conventional memory than is currently available on your computer, the program may not run correctly or at all, and an error message indicating that there is insufficient memory to run the program may be displayed. When this occurs, you must reconfigure your computer so that more conventional memory is available.

In order to solve this, some changes need to be made in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Adding the following lines to the existing autoexec.bat file (or modifying the appropriate line) is necessary:

LH c:\dos\smartdrv.exe

LH c:\apps\doskey.com -i

path c:\apps;c:\dos;c:\dos\net

set DIRCMD=/o:gne

set TEMP=c:\temp

Add (or modify) the following lines in the Config.sys file:

SWITCHES=/f

DEVICE=c:\dos\himem.sys /testmem:off

DEVICEHIGH=c:\dos\emm386.exe ram i=b000-b7ff

DOS=high,umb

BREAK=on

rem DEVICEHIGH=c:\dos\setver.exe

Leave all the other files intact. This will now load the older DOS programs without memory problems.