Platinum Edition Using® Microsoft® Windows® XP

Setting Environment Variables and the Path

The default CONFIG.NT file contains three settings:

dos=high, umb
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
files=40

These three specifications, respectively, instruct the system to load DOS in high memory, to use the himem.sys memory manager in the \Windows\system32 directory, and set the maximum number of open files to 40. These settings, of course, apply only to the DOS environment used by the application.

The most common configuration changes required are to increase the number of file handles (files=nn) and to add a device specification such as device=ansi.sys.

You may also add additional environmental variables—although many of these can better be included in the application's .pif specification—as ...