TO ALL READERS....THIS REVIEW OF IBM'S NEW RELEASE OF DOS 4.0 CONTAINS 
OPINIONS OF SOLELY OF THE AUTHOR THOMAS M. EATON. IT IS INTENDED 
SOLELY AS INFORMATIONAL AND NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS AN ENDORSEMENT OF 
THE PRODUCT DESCRIBED.

After reading the review of DOS 4.0 contained in the Archive file 
DOS4EVAL.ARC, I felt it necessary to create this document for the 
purpose of showing the "other side" of the story....
	First my opinions on the enhancements on the new release of 
4.0....then I wish to restate some of the other comments made by the 
author of the above mentioned Archive file. I highly reccomend any 
person reading this article also download DOS4EVAL.ARC for 
comparision purposes.

Major Enhancements:

1.)	Foremost is the addition of a DOS Shell from which all utility 
(DOS) functions and application porgrams can be envoked without a user 
ever eaching the familiar C> DOS prompt. In addition, each major menu 
or individual program selection can be passworded to provide user 
protection of individual programs or groups of programs contained in a 
menu. Also, if a user desires, they may drop from the shell back to 
the more familiar C> prommpt to execute any function they desire 
(NOTE: when exiting the shell a 7k kernel remains resident in memory 
and a user must type "exit" to return to the shell rather than 
re-envoking the batch file used to intially start the DOSSHELL 
program; if not each drop to DOS will layer a 7k kernel until all 
memory is used up...this is documented in the manual). With the shell, 
a user may display two seperate directories...move files...change 
attributes...along with many other features found on programs such as 
the Norton Commander/Utilities and the OS2 Presentation Manager.

2.)	A Menu driven installation program that will aloow the user to 
setup and configure their system with a new or existing machine 
without having to reformat the hard drive. (I would personnaly 
recommend backing up the drive as a safety feature.) Since I purchased 
the 3.5 inch version from IBM (for future usage) and my PC only 
contains 5.25 inch drives, I was unable to use this in the 
installation at home...prior to actually leaving the dealer (AC3 in 
Anniston, AL.) I installed it on 2 different PS/2 systems and a clone 
286 system for learning purposes only (later removed from all 3); I 
installed it directly to different drive configurations including 
installing it to a floppy drive configuration with no problem or loss 
of data. In addition, to facilitate installing it on my PC at home, I 
copied all files to 5.25 floppies and installed it on my PC at home 
using the manuals provided with little difficulty although I did have 
to reformat my hard drive since I could not use the installation 
program. (probably better in the long run anyway)


3.)	Support for Hard drives beyond the 32Mb limit...IBM does state 
the if you intend to take a current disk beyond 32Mb you MUST backup 
and reformat the drive and then reload those files onto the newly 
partioned disk...this is done using FDISK which still gives the choice 
of using logical drives within a large disk or using it all as one 
Physical device.

4.)	Support for extended/expanded memory with new devices drivers 
that support both LIM 4.0 and IBM's PS/2 expanded memory Adapter/A.The only problem encountered here are that these drivers only 
recognize IBM's memory boards but I own AN AST Board w/drivers that 
still work just fine under 4.0.

5.)	New enhanced ANSI.SYS that allows all the old functions and also 
parameters that control/restrict extended keyboard usage and the 
ability to work with the new MODE command to maintain the number of 
lines shown on the screen when normally an application program would 
change it back to default values.

6.)	Additional support for code page switching w/EGA and VGA adapters 
and code page switching with IBM printers or printers that emulae IBM.This is done with PRINTER.SYS, GRAPHICS.COM, GRAPHICS.PRO and 
DISPLAY.SYS files.

7.)	Additional keyboard support for additional countries w/different 
keyboard layouts...evenn includes simplified Chinese (Personally I 
don't believe I'll be using that).

8.)	Date and time can be used in "normal" format such 3:00 pm vs. 
15:00...

9.) 	Detailed error messages stating what exactly happened or what 
you're about to do!

10.)	Various new utils and enhancements of the old commands...all 
downwardly compatible to earlier version of DOS.

These are just some of the major enhancements with this release...many 
are better documented in the user manula provided with the manuals.

Please read in addition to this document, comment.txt for answers to 
questions raised in the DOS4EVAL.ARC file.

			Tom Eaton
			
Brought to you by Golden Springs BBS (205)238-0012 
Opinions expressed are solely those of the author.