Best marketing oppo for Xero (vs Sage) EVER!

It’s not too bad, I have only had to make 3 repairs in the last 25 years. The box runs pretty bare; Windows 98SE & DOS on a primary boot hard drive, and the accounting software on it’s own separate hard drive, which is backed up over the network daily.

Windows 98 didn’t come native with USB support but I was able to get drivers to allow the use of flash drives. Win98 did have network support so the other computers and NAS recognizes and plays well with that computer. The assistance of software like Swissknife allows for the formatting of Hard Drives in Fat16 which the General Ledger software prefers. Drivers were a bit of an issue, but I have all of them stored safely in a file if ever needed.

I have 2 or 3 Acronis clones of the primary boot drive that are hot swappable in case that disk goes bad. The files for the general ledger software and client files are backed up daily and can just be copied back to the “working drive” if that ever goes bad. The great thing about software that ran with Dos is there is no need to install that software… they just run from an executable file or batch file once you copy it to where you want it. No Windows registry crap to deal with.

Windows98 was the last version of Windows that would let you boot to “pure dos” as a selection rather than the newer versions that want to run in “command” or a dos-shell.

Probably not ideal for most offices, but works well for us, and I’m too old to change now.

We run our own Dos payroll software as well, which I update in December each year. We wrote that software, so it was easier to make it run through Windows10 or Windows11 using software like Vdos plus. Our payroll software runs 10 times faster than anything commercially available as well. When I click on the “payroll” icon on my desktop it opens a list of all our payroll clients along with the date of the next expected payroll run for each client. That way I know who’s payroll needs to be run and when.

Dos applications in 2025 are definitely not for the faint of heart.

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Curiously, I still have a couple of my old HDDs from way back in the days of DOS and was wondering about what it would be like to fire 'em back up. Maybe I’ll get one of those old PCs and see!

You need to have the correct IDE controllers (along with power supply) in your computer, whereas the newer computers use SATA or sometimes NVME controllers. You can also still find IDE external HDD enclosures and use the drive as an external drive. I think they even sell SATA to IDE adapters if you are mounting inside.

You need to format the drive with FAT, FAT32, or NTFS if the computer is new enough to recognize NTFS. You would normally select a cluster size or allocation unit size depending on what size of files you might normally be using. Swissknife software is a great tool for formatting older hard drives (spinners).

A working hard disk formatted for use by any prior version of Windows can be read by any later Windows versions.

I have a couple of those external IDE drive adapters…have used them to recover data in the past. Quite handy. Haven’t (as yet – and haven’t really “looked”) found an old PC for sale though…