Is your old hardware sitting in a corner gathering dust? Are DOS and Windows 3.1 the only operating systems (OSs) that run fast enough on your machine? Well, then here’s one solution to give new life to your old hardware. NewDeal Release 3 is like a complete OS together with tons of applications for everyday use. It has a Windows 9x like interface, making it very easy to use. We’ve given a 45-day trial version of the software on this month’s CD for you to try out.

In this article, we’ll see how to install and configure NewDeal and use its various applications.

Installation

Setting up NewDeal to run on your computer requires no elaborate procedures; nor does it require any elaborate hardware. In fact NewDeal claims that the minimum system requirements for it to work are a 286 with only 640 kB RAM and 9 MB of free hard drive space. We ran it on a 486 machine with 32 MB RAM. Interestingly, the technical support FAQs say that NewDeal is a computer OS and not a disk OS. So it needs a disk operating system like DOS 3 or above to install. It can also be installed on top of your existing Win 9x/NT setup. Here, however, you may have some problems with the installation of the mouse and printer. These have been discussed later in this article.

You can run the installer from the DOS prompt or through Windows. If you have Windows as the primary OS, use the F8 menu to change to command prompt while booting. Alternatively, you can ‘Restart in MS-DOS mode’ from start>shut down. However make sure that you’ve installed the DOS drivers for your CD drive, else you won’t be able to access it. Now go to the CD-ROM drive of your machine and to the directory \cdrom\featred\newdeal, and run install.exe to start the installation process. You can also execute this file through Windows. After the customary license agreement, you are shown the readme file. We suggest that you keep a hard copy of this file before you actually start the installation.

When prompted for country settings, leave it to default USA and move on. Enter the path where you want to install NewDeal. The package takes up only around 10 MB of hard disk space and the installer requires at least 520 kB of free conventional memory (RAM). For this, make sure that himem.sys is loaded during startup. You can check for this in your config.sys file.

The installation copies all the necessary files and then makes some changes to your config.sys and autoexec.bat files. The config.sys is modified to change the memory settings and the autoexec.bat to include NewDeal in the system path so that it can be executed from a command prompt anywhere. Copies of your existing files are saved in case you need to uninstall the software. That’s about it.