welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we're going to be talking
about optimizing files for disk let's get started first we'll take a look at
what is on a common boot disk for dos version 6.2 - to do that we'll use the
der command we will focus that on the eighth drive and we'll use the switch W
for a wide display and we are going to use the order by name here we have the
files from the boot disk the boot disk is intended to allow you to boot up a
system of course and give you some basic tools for maybe troubleshooting or
partitioning a hard drive formatting and getting ready to put an operating system
on it so it does give you some basic tools besides just getting you to the
DOS prompt these tools are maybe not the best or most powerful tools that are
available they're certainly not the most efficient when it comes to space well
that's what we're going to talk about today so this one does still have 51k
free this is an untouched disk nothing's been removed or swapped or anything like
that there are actually some files that come on these discs that may not really
be useful every time you boot the PC for example there's a program that comes on
here called qbasic it lets you write in the basic programming language it also
has a help file that's pretty large in size along with the help file for the
edit program which we may not need to reference every time we use the PC but
now I would like to swap the disk here
and we'll take a look at a boot disk that I created with some various
replacement files that you can find on the internet thanks to das key I can
press the up arrow on the keyboard and it shows us the command that we last
typed is fantastic so a little bit different we have about six hundred and
fifty eight K left on the disk which is good these are 1.44 megabyte floppy
disks that is there factoring specification after the disk
has been formatted you have about 1.3 8 megabytes worth of space on this book
disk here that I customized there are a couple files that I have removed
including qbasic like we talked about edit because that was replaced with te
XE over there on the right it is a very small program for editing files which is
preferable to the default edit app because that can be rather large
especially on a boot disk like this I have also removed the CD 1 2 3 4 .
since files that you can still see above there the reason for this is because
they were replaced by a much more efficient cd-rom driver that is cd-rom
dot says the mouse calm and malsu's files were also replaced with cute mouse
or CT mouse also the microsoft CD extension MSC de x that has been
replaced with the SHC DX 33 F com so this boot disc actually has all the
same features as the other one it just uses significantly less space on the
disc which is good so we can actually put more files on here as we move
forward this is more to focus on replacing some of the applications that
come on a standard boot disc now I would like to restart the PC and we'll watch
it boot with the boot disc in place
as you can see there are some different lines here than before our cd-rom
drivers are different that's why it's giving some different results there's
some credits right there in the file about who created them and we also have
our cute mouse that installed there at the bottom and says it's on a ps2 port
the mouse driver can do either a serial mouse or a ps2 mouse possibly a USB
mouse if the BIOS were set in the legacy mode it tries to emulate the ps2
interface so DAWs can still read that a mouse is connected to the PC in this
case cute Mouse is giving us a little more detailed saying that it is on the
ps2 port another thing to note about these replacement files is that some of
them like cute mouse and the cd-rom drivers can be stopped once they're
started so they're not constantly sitting in memory but you do have the
option to unload some of these things if you were going to use a program that
doesn't have the mouse maybe you didn't know that when you were starting the PC
and you made a selection for the standard boot that included Mouse or
cd-rom support you do now have the option to turn those off before you
launch the program which gives you a little more versatility with these apps
opposed to the default dos ones so let's open the T application and we'll take a
look at autoexec.bat first some things you'll notice that are different off the
bat no mouse support in this version of the program there is an indicator where
the beginning and the end of a file is there's some credits down at the bottom
for who created the application - as you might expect the line for loading the CD
driver and the mouse is a little bit different than the one that we have been
using now these will also work with our main installation they don't need to be
on the floppy disk but the point of having them on the floppy disk is for
space reasons we don't necessarily have that same space limitation on the hard
drive there are several editors this isn't the only
one out there that's relatively small and powerful you may not like this
particular editor and that's okay there's plenty to choose from and
they're all plenty good they accomplish the same task so as we don't have mouth
support we will take a look at that you can fix this file this way essentially
the same thing as before just the CD driver is a little bit different it's
calling a different driver for the cd-rom and lastly I want to take a quick
look at the memory management aspect of things to see how that worked out so
these are much smaller than the programs that we have been using thank you for
joining me in this high-level look at optimizing a deep disk I will put the
names of the files and what we replace them with in the description please
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