Here's our Windows 95/98 Tip for.. March 13, 1997
Click Here to see a complete list of all of our previously released Tips!
Post-Installation cleanup
You probably already noticed the Windows 95 installation filled up the root of your boot hard drive. Most of these files are no longer necessary. Only AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM are still needed to run Windows 95 (and even Autoexec.bat and Config.sys are questionable).

Also, make sure to check your StartUp files for redundancies. Some existing entries in your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS may be unnecessary, especially if you upgraded Windows 95 over an old version. The following commands now are executed internally, by IO.SYS by default:

himem.sys ifshelp.sys setver.exe dos=high,umb files=60 buffers=30 fcbs=4 lastdrive=z stacks=9,256 shell=command.com /p

You can overwrite these settings by including your own custom entries in the startup files in case these defaults don't suit your needs.

Below are examples of what a new "trimmed down" Autoexec.bat and Config.sys might look like.

Using the above configuration, we were able to achieve 609K Free DOS memory running in a DOS window in Win95! If we booted straight to a DOS (7.0) prompt we get an incredible 622K Free. If that isn't reason enough to do a little StartUp file housecleaning, we don't know what is. (Are you gamers listening?) Remember, before making changes to any critical system files, always make a BACKUP first.