Windows® 98 Unleashed

Understanding PIFs

If you ran DOS programs under Windows 3.x, you probably became familiar with Program Information Files (PIFs) and the PIF Editor. A PIF is a file that's associated with a specific DOS program. Windows 3.x used PIFs to store various settings and options that controlled how DOS programs operated. For example, you'd use a PIF to tell Windows how much memory to allocate to a program.

PIFs are still alive and well in Windows 98, but their role has been expanded significantly. A particular PIF now contains settings for all the DOS program properties you learned about earlier in this chapter (screen options, fonts, and so on), as well as properties related to memory, environment, MS-DOS mode, and many more. (I'll talk about most of ...