@Ath: Thanks for pointing that out about
FreeDOS' interesting differences to MS-DOS. My knowledge of DOS is rather limited.
I'm not sure whether it is feasible, but, given the tortuous problems
@hulkbuster seems to be facing with FREEDOS, I'd suggest he consider installing
DR-DOS instead.
I had tried/used several versions of DOS over the years - I don't think I ever used FREEDOS though - the last I settled on being (I think) DR-DOS or MS-DOS 6.2 with JP Software's command-line interpreter
4DOS on top of that, which I installed on every PC I supported/used. I do recall the various DOSes having minor differences, but I don't recall them having particularly different or peculiar syntax or control characters compared to MS-DOS. Looks like FREEDOS might have been an exception to that, anyway.
To get the most out of the chronically limited/constrained x86 PC resources on the PCs I supported, I employed a nifty boot startup control language ("Command32" or something - I forget) that I tweaked, together with a RAM optimiser -
Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM) - to offer the user selective paths/choices at bootup, which optimised and configured the use of the 64K RAM (Upper/Lower) depending on what the user intended doing - i.e., whether one was going to play a game (e.g., DOOM) or do some number-crunching (e.g.,
Ashton-Tate's Framework). I mostly avoided using Windows when it was introduced.
The Command32 (or whatever it was called) enabled the user choices to automatically
dynamically change/reconfigure the parameters/commands in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files
during the booting process.
Last and for the longest time, I used DR-DOS/MS-DOS 6.2 with 4DOS - the latter being compatible with most DOSes, I think, (so it was not necessary to learn/remember any DOS version peculiarities) and which was really more of a macro-driven CLI extension to DOS with a whole bunch of extra (and quite powerful) commands in its command set. This all helped to
insulate one from the constipated and limited MS-DOS (or DOS variant) and one could literally program the DOS almost like a GUI, whilst making it far more user-friendly and efficient/fast. I rarely - if ever - needed to use the accursed native DOS or directly edit the Autoexec.bat or Config.sys files after that, never looked back, and forgot how to use DOS.
![embarassed :-[](https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/Smileys/fun/blush.gif)
After that, to solve some specific problems of data capture at the time, I turned my attention to better capturing/controlling the I/O data flows through the dial-up modem, using a brilliant scripting tool included in
Telix.
All of this worked rather well,
despite DOS!
![Grin ;D](https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/Smileys/fun/laugh.gif)