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Despite the lack of fundamental changes in MS - DOS version 6, many users will find compelling reasons to make the upgrade.
The biggest incentive comes from Doublespace, which provides on - the - fly disk compression.
Doublespace, as the name implies, nearly doubles disk capacity for a typical mix of user data - and it's a lot easier to install than a new hard drive.
There are costs, however, starting with slower data access.
In tests on an 80286 - based system with a very slow hard disk, and on an 80386 - based system with a slow hard disk, reading data sequentially was nearly as fast with Doublespace as without it, but sequential writes took about twice as long, and random writes were even slower.
The performance change is greater with a faster hard disk, and less with a faster processor, but it varies with the application. I found that loading Windows gave identical before and after times, for example.
The other cost is memory. Doublespace takes 44K of conventional or upper memory.
This probably doesn't matter on standalone PCs, but might be a concern on net - worked systems, where it could prevent use of some memory - hungry applications.
Nasty surprise
Doublespace has some similarities to Stacker, published by Stac Electronics of Carlsbad, Calif. Stacker appears to provide slightly more compression than Doublespace on some types of data, as well as furnishing some additional functions, such...