A lot of choice, what is your prefered one?

I use a combination of GeoShell and Nu2menu.

I use nu2menu as the main shell with a link to run explorer when needed. The explorer plugin is one I created that does not support internet explorer as I use Opera and does appear to work with Drive Image 7 v2isr.

Well I have an option while booting ie

Boot Windows XP from CD : Complete Windows Xp with explorer as shell (Explorer &ie ver39) and incase of no hard disk this serves as my operating system with all things ie internet, winamp, open office and more

Boot Windows PE : This forms an interface for fast booting rescue cd with Nu2menu as a shell.

So this forms a complete cd with both operating system and rescue mode

compuboy_r

How did you do that? Can you give me instructions?

Interesting: Nu2Menu is , for the moment of this poll, the shell massively used, especially for recovery.

Is it because you find it more reliable and faster?

Exactly. Its small and loads fast. Its exactly what you need for a rescue CD.

My WindowsCD (BartPE) it possesses several shells:
Aston Shell - it is very good, it is identical to the used in Normal Windows.
Nu2Menu - Only in slow computers.
Nu2Geo (Nu2menu + Geoshell v2) - Only utiized in intermediate computers.
OpenMenu - Clone of Nu2Menu, however it possesses icons in the programs.
Explorer New - Fast, however it locks a lot.

And use PeShell Swaper 1.5

xpe + nu2parse, so nu2menu must be enabled too, and I have a hidden button for nu2menu.
Actually I am using boths shells, Xpe+nu2parse and nu2menu as ´background´ shell.

Well, technically I'm using PEShell as my shell but the shells in which I actually do something are nu2menu and Explorer&IE. Just adding to the mix...

Ixel

I use my own, but didn't vote.

I have been making some major advances to the changes on my plugin, so for everyone that has already downloaded it, there will soon be some updates...

As always, get explorernew from here: http://www.netlinkave.com/~myweb/explorernew.zip

I too use PE shell as shell but it will take you to XPE intially and then if you want change the shell later to Nu2 menu or Cmd..like that...


So the poll should include PEShell also.

I took explorer directly from windows xp and put it in windows pe. works like a charm

I use LiteStep It fast shell

You mist a lot of choice.
I use Windows Explorer, because I use WinPE and not Bart
Next times don’t forget CMD.EXE, Not everybody knows how to change shell.

this is my fav and am definitely looking forward to these mentioned updates....

I use my own customized shell.

I made it at and for the company I work.

currently use nu2menu, but testing with Explorer & IE, may change very soon

Gday guys newbie to this stuff been looking around for the last six months.
Just wondering does anyone have a guide or link to adding nu2 menu shell to win pe 1.2?

I'm working on running Y's Dock. It is a rare and hard to find DX app (cause Apple shut it down) that emulates the OSX dock. It supports icon zooming when you mouse-over, drag and drop to add and remove icons from the dock, and transparent png image support for really nice looking icons. I'm not a mac fan, but the dock was a nice idea. I'm also using WinMac to run the menu bar across the top of the screen, for authenticity's sake.

I think, next I'll work on doing an Amiga themed PE.

I've written my own shell, also. no name yet. But I think I will revisit the project and see what I can come up with. I might work on iconizing it with a minimize button and keeping it always on top. So it is small and out of the way when you don't need it.

It supports transparency and weird shaped windows and can even act as a file and web browser and mp3 player. I might be onto something if I can get sound to work...

Hi to all
a very nice shell approach I found at
http://www.pecd.net/modules.php?name=Forum...=viewtopic&t=68
using Progman.exe, a simple and great idea.
However closed folders do not like as nice as in Win 3.1
Using the Win 3.1 real Progman.exe seems not to be possible as Win 3.1 Progman.exe wants to write the ini- and grp-files to the CD ROM.
Has any one looked more detailed into it how to change the icon of closed folders to look like Win 3.1?
Annother problem is exporting and importing the registry of folders and icons in one step.
Thanks & regards

litestep here too.

I see this thread has been bumped again, but I have built my PECD from Microsoft Windows PE 2004, and use barts NU2Menu. Now my only question is what do you guys use for a taskbar? I know Geoshell has one but I really don't like the way it looks. All I am looking for a is a program that will organize my minimized windows.
Any ideas?

I use Explorer straight from Windows.

I just use Nu2Menu, because i didn't have another, how can I get this, er ... XP ... thing (the 2nd vote)

I use a multiboot CD.

The first option is BartPE with nu2menu+geoshell and Autoramresizer (boot in 64MB of RAM).

The second option is XPE with ramdisk @ 24MB (boot in 96MB of RAM).

The option 3, 4, 5... are DOS boot with rescue programs, RAM test, Partition Magic and so on.

nu2menu remain the best smallest footprin shell. Peloader+peshell swapper are good alternative. I hope a day they come into only one shell with module (*dll) for example. it's a better choice to debug and to add function

I have used
geoshell + nu2menu
litestep + nu2menu

Both are fairly close in terms of system resources.

I'm currently working on a version of litestep without nu2menu which should actually be lighter weight then the one with nu2menu.

I keep nu2menu on all my installs so I can easily access the proggies under windows. It makes a nice menu this way.

After reading this thread I'm going to look into open menu though.

BS_Explorer

@pumuckl

Under win 3.1, the default location of progman.ini is in %windir%. This is the directory that contains the the copy of win.com that windows was launched from.

You can quite easily boot Windows 3.1 from a cdrom, with complete read/write access to the groups. See, for example my comments on booting Windows 3.1 at

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2116

However, all the WinNT progman.exe files save their entries to registry. Registry or not, Progman uses the current windows to load its defaults. So even if there is a progman.ini right next to it, it will still ignore that and search for one in the windows directory.

You can not instruct progman to use a different ini file.



The fault here is not in progman, but the way that Win32 impliments the MDI interface. This is the one where one program has several documents open in the main window. For example the Win16 INF viewer (XVIEW.EXE) also minimises its windows to the same way that progman does.

My suspicion was that the task bar in Win95 explorer is actually implemented as an MDI interface (with everything closed), and correspondingly the hack changed the way that all MDI windows work.

Progman

Progman was a pretty nasty shell, largely because of the MDI thing.

In 1992, the practice was to have the computer boot into a DOS character-mode menu system, from which you select some application. Such menus could contain either further menus or program items.

Even the program manager in DOSSHELL supports intermingling of menus and items, and menu nesting. So did the program that progman.exe was derived from (OS/2's pmexec.exe).

Progman was then a "showcase" for the MDI interface. Each group was a document, and each group could only contain items (and not other groups). The way that progman was implemented meant that the "main menu" contained menus, and the submenus contained "items".

Even by 1990 standards, this is a serious limitation, and the after-market shell replacement became the third biggest class of Windows 3.1 software.

Unlike some of the other shells, while you can run progman, it will load the current program groups. You can't use it as a kind of graphical shell that plugs into a second group.

You can't really dynamically load groups either, except via a DDE call. So if you have, eg a cdrom, you can't create a progman group on the root of the cdrom, and load it when you insert the cdrom.

progman is, ultimately, the gui EDLIN.

@Wendy
thanks for your detailed infos - I will have to read it several times to understand mostly because I'am not a technican like you.

I also experimented a lot with win 3.1 having versions for any drive-letter incl. bootable CD-ROM and ramdisk, but I did it without installing it for each drive letter.
Instead I used COA.EXE, an excelent utility from 1995 which changes all *.GRP and *.INI files to your needs e.g. C:\W31 into D:\W31 by just copying to drive D:, calling COA.EXE from the main C:\W31 and changing all those entries in D:\W31.

COA.EXE can be found at:
h??p://delphi.icm.edu.pl/ftp/d10free/coa.zip

I liked very much to use this W31 for surfing with OPERA16 or old Netscape beeing save for all viruses, as this browser could handle all standard web-pages.

It was just a fun to fiddle W31 and to do with W31 what I want and early the 1990-years I had to make sure for my company that about 200 PC's with Win 3.1 are not crashing - so that job was very exiting - and also protecting my installations to restore easyly groups and ini's misleaded by the users.; finaly I attributed some 'gamer'-PC's with read-only attributes..... like CD-ROM and they always worked fine.

In 1994 I changed personally to OS/2 - which is the best OS we ever had and I'am still missing today - but for my job-reasons I had to deal with M$-OP's....

The thread
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?show...opic=2116&st=0&
from 'betaluva' was dealing with Weniger's (China-DOS) MINIWIN. I found that this was not working as promised regarding lfn-support. The bootdisk from Weniger did also not work so I had to revise it, but still no lfn-dos support.
I don't know what's todays Wenigers development stage is there, but I have given up since the least 8 month to get dos-lfn-support working.

I had always dual-boot systems on my PC within the same partition eg. PCDOS7/W31 with Win9X. The patch you mentioned is not working with 98SE and my manual hex-edit at the corresponding of IO.SYS locations did not work too; it either crashed or it allways booted straight into W9X. (Must be something in the boot-record or the reason is the German version.

Further my new PC from July 2004 with MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4200 VTP VGA-Adapter I could not get running win 3.1 in XGA-mode so for that reason I also have given up.

For my new PC and my Laptop I will make again a bootable W9X-CD inline with c't-Magazin artikle when I have time - also I'am in pension now; currently most of my spare time is spend to Bart PEBuilder - which is an increadeble fantastic tool - Thanks to Bart!! It is so exciting as in the early 1990's.

Here - in Bart PE - I use NU2MENU+Geoshell +PROGMAN.EXE from XP in order to have Icons to start programs. Via regedit I enter the reg-entries from:

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Program Manager"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Program Groups"

before starting progman.exe as a convertion into the inf-file is not working.

The only disadvantage is the 'look' of closed groups and the fact that the description of the groups is serious and inside the folder; I could not find any in the web to get closed groups looking like W31-Groups - so I leave all groups open and have my icons to start the program I need.
Besides the speed advantage over XPE the icons can be created via drag&drop and after saving the a.m. reg-entries all is fixed for the next PE-Version. In general I'am happy with this solution for the above reasons.

Thank you again for your detailed infos - Horst alias Pumuckl

P.S. More infos - if you wish - we should do outside this thread via PM

I have a cdrom, for DOS and Windows setup, from which i run also Windows from the CD.

I am aware of Weinneger's version of Windows 3.1 and 95, and i have started to fix the 95 version up.

I really can't see the point of his 3.1, though, since you don't have to run Windows 3.1 binaries from the RAMDISK. The thing works quite well in diskless workstations, with a shared system directory, and separate user directories.

I really can't see the point of patching the files after Windows is set up: you can quite easily set the thing up under subst, because windows 3.1 does not look through subst.

Correspondingly, the Windows network %windir% is well under 480 kb, which means it fits quite well onto a floppy. Don't forget, that Windows 3.1 was intended to run on diskless networked workstations with 8MB ram or less.

The idea here is that the network drive is shared between users, as say, s:\ and the user home is h:\ So the h:\win directory has *only* the ini files, win.com, and winver.exe, The s:\win31 directory has the network install. Nothing about what drive windows is installed on is in s:\win31. On the server, this might be e:\apps\win31, where e:\apps is shared out as s:\ to the users.

What it means is that you can boot Windows on a very tiny footprint.

The relevance of the Weinneger effort is that when Windows is completely in the ramdrive, you can remove the floppy disk. Even here, though, Windows affords lots of room in "thining out the product" without loss of functionality (ie use vga etc) and kill of drivers, etc. It also does not loose any kind of functionality.

One could, without loss of generality, copy icons of your apps into a copy of moreicons.dll, and point all your group icons at that DLL, and index number. So when you create an icon with "write.exe" as the exe line, and "myicons.dll,17" as the DLL, where that DLL is in the r:\win directory, it *doesn't matter* whether windows is in the r:\ drive or the s:\drive, write.exe will always be found by a path search.

On the other hand, the icon that progman shows *does* need to be in a stable path, which is why you might consider dragging the icons out of the apps into a single file, which is part of the user directory.

I have always multibooted, but in these cases, i have *always* put Win9x into its own partition, but its boot block is off the c-drive. This is because, some virii look for c\windows, (i never use that directory name).

Also note that the c:\ drive is now pretty much limited to under 500 MB, largely because some proggies will make it fat32 if it's over that size.

PC-DOS 7
------------

Most of the utilities of PC-DOS 7.0 have been defanged, and run quite happily under any DOS. I ran, for example, DOS 7 subst under MS-DOS 5, All kinds of DOS 6, Windows 95, Windows 98 SE.

If you multiboot under a commercial bootmanager, you can feed most of the DOS utilities through the PC-DOS stuff, with just a minimal native DOS.

Windows 9x
--------------

I very rarely install Windows 9x into the c:\ drive. This is left for "real" DOS.

The DOS Patch
------------------

I did patch a version of DOS 7.10.2222 (ie the one from Windows 98SE), and ran it from both Win98 and Win31 in the same sessions. None the same, the two sources of patch DOS versions *do not work* as designed, so i found

http://www.oldstuff.myagora.net/powerload/...oad/3xStart.exe
http://www.oldstuff.myagora.net/powerload/...isk/msd710s.zip

as the basis of my DOS. You still have to patch the MS-DOS in msd710 with 3xStart.exe, but it works like a dream elsewise.

The links don't work as designed, but google for 3xStart.exe and msd710s.zip and you should find current links to them.

The DOS in Weinneger's set is 7.10.1999, it is based around codepage 936, whereas the msd710s.zip version is 7.10.2222 based around the English cp 437 one.

In any case, you *can* run Win31 under two different DOS versions under the same time. You can also multiboot Windows 95 and Windows 98, by doing a couple of tricks.

I am thinking one day of thinning out a lot of the old legacy stuff out of Windows 3.1, mainly old dot-matrix print drivers network drivers, etc, to reduce the size of source. It, knowing my skill, should work like a dream.

W

Progman.exe is not a real good shell to use, either under Windows 3.1 or 9x or NT.

The thing is too heavily tied to the installation to be a General Purpose loader. You can't really load groups except via dde, (although i do have such a thing)

This is a neat tcmd16 btm file that makes groups for you. I normally run it under my install of Windows, as a way of setting up all the groups.

Basically, pg makes a group, and ni makes an icon, replacing the previous one of the same name. I normally run this batch from the base of the app tree, and i have all the Windows utilities (like winfile, winhelp, progman.exe &c, all nested in the \win31\exe directory. [which is in the DOS path].

The %ybase%\util directory is not pathed, is home to lots of other stuff.

You simply save the following as mkgroup.btm, and run it from the tcmd16 window. You can get tcmd16 as freeware from jpsoft's ftp site.

CreateGroup(Group name, [group.grp])
ShowGroup(Group name, 1) -> show as maximise
ShowGroup(Group name, 6) -> minimise the group

ni icon-title iconlocation

Note i have single names for my icons, not multi-word stuff.

Let the batch run to completion.

In essence, you drag the whole folder across to some location on the c:\ drive,
fire up take command /16, and then run this batch. It fills out all the icons for you.

You have to run it in the install of Windows you are planning to use, and the apps should be in the drive that windows expects them to find. So if you're making a cdrom, they should be in the directory that the cdrom will be loaded into.

So you can do, off the same cdrom.

1. put the cdrom in (suppose it ends up x:)
path c:\win31;x:\win31;x:\win31apps\exe;%path%
2. run x:\win31\setup.exe
3. run x:\win31apps\util\tcmd.exe x:\win31apps\mkgroups

and you are pretty much up and running, with a 100 kb install, on the local hard drive, running windows 3.1 and ready to run windows complete with installed apps.

You can quite easily add what needs to be added to the windows directory, by adding things to the setup.network bits of setup.inf

@ this-is-me

I have downloaded your explorernew.zip file.......since it is not a .cab file, I don't have a clue as to what goes where.....any hints....? I would love to try it out...do you have any installation guide...anywhere...

Hey. I am not updating my plugins anymore, but all information should be in the info.txt file.

i made my own shell with a HTA page, works great.

meh I am now using a variation of blackbox with some custom plugins that make it look like windows. The whole shell runs in under 1 meg most the time. Staying at close to 500k or a little less allot of the time.


Here are some examples.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/14907344/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/14907448/

In my opinion xpe looks the most like a real windows eXplorer

thats because it is the real windows explorer. It also runs slow on older systems which is why some of us prefer to use shells like bblean that uses only about 500k of ram instead of explorer which uses about 30megs of ram with all it's supporting libraries.

To be fair the last time I checked with another explorer shell for pe though it was only using about 10 megs but that is still a huge amount and xpe may take more I'm not sure. And it only uses more ram the more desktop icons you use and the more menu entries you have.

some of the systems I work on dont have enough resources to use a shell like that.

Hi
Plz HElp For Add All Shell Win Pe.
Link For Download

You should definitively try xoblite..


Fully customizable shell - with all sort of plugins that run an acceptable shell under 1Mb of RAM and disk size..

Best of all are the options that make your shell look really good with really low resources demands!

+ Winpeshl
└+ PEShell
  └+ PENetCfg
    ├ CMD
    ├ Defragmentor
    ├ Drive Image 2002
    ├ Explorer
    ├ Regedit
    ├ Restoration
    ├ Setup
    └ WinImage 8.0

I should finally start messing with the OPK Extender. =/

Yes. A big reason to tackle PCs via Bart CDR boot is to deal with malware, and I'd rather avoid the exploitability of Explorer as shell. I also want to reduce the risk of accidental writes to hard drive, in the context of data recovery, file system corruption and failing hard drives.

So, to "reliable" and "faster" I would add "safer", and rate that the main reason.

where is bsexplorer ?

Can someone give me a link to litestep xp plz

What do you mean by "litestep Xp"?

http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php
http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php?id=lsdev:downloads

What you want is probably LOSI:
http://tlundberg.com/LOSI/
http://tlundberg.com/LOSI/downloads.html

jaclaz

Out of the blue you responded to a 2 1/2 year old posting???

He's having a Senior Moment.

It was Easter, I was feeling good.

Really, there must have been a "glitch in the matrix" (possibly my brain ).

I could swear this thread came out on either "new posts" or "today's active topics", but evidently it came out from some search on the board instead.

Sorry for the unintentional "bump".

jaclaz

If someone replys to a Poll question the thread's date gets updated. I suspect that is what happened here.