Hi Netters,

As promised, here are the summary of opinions on DoubleDisk Gold v.6.0.
People seem to be quite happy with the product. There is no much of
opinion on how good it is compared to the industry leader Stacker 3.0.
(Superstor Pro is not considered since it is slower than Stacker although
just as reliable - BYTE Magazine's conclusion ;-) ), so it's hard to make
any decision to go with Stacker or with DoubleDisk Gold v6.0. 
However, it seems that at $39.95, it is quite a buy.

Buddy Christyono
buddy@optics.ece.wisc.edu
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summary of replies
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Hello Buddy,

I do not have DD Gold 6.0 experience.  I just ordered it.  I currently have
DD 2.3 (the last version).  I am very pleased with its performance.

Here is my suggestion...

1)  If you do not have any compression software currently, I would go with
	DOS 6.0's compression.  All the discussion on the net indicates that
	for $50 you get the compression (built into the OS), plus the other
	utilities that you would pay way more than $50 for.  Besides, you 
	are now at DOS6.0 (whatever that means...)

2)  If you have DoubleDisk 2.3 already (like I do), the cost is $29.95
	for the upgrade.  After thinking about it and asking the net, I
	decided that I could not go wrong with the update cost!
	I have never suffered from performance of DD.  I have a 12ms HD with
	large SW packages in both compressed and uncompressed format.  It
	works great.  Not delays.  I think the "A" is better than "B" 
	arguements are a lot of bunk... they are all comparable in performance.
	I am looking forward to being able to "LOADHIGH" the DD sw.  That
	has been an annoyance.

3)  If you have Stacker, et.al. currently, I would not see it worth the
	effort to upgrade.

Just my $.02 ...

Regards,
Mark Bagdy
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Buddy,

I got the same mailer. About 2 weeks ago I got DDG and installed it. The
documentation was, in my opinion, easy to follow. I used the automatic
installation (not the custom) and everything went smoothly.

There were some specific instructions on a readme file for dealing with 386max
& QEMM. DDG has an uninstall (unlike DOS6.0) if you need it. My system has a
203Mb hard drive. before installing DDG I had ~5Mb free. After DDG I had
~197Mb free. Pretty good statistics considering that my 8Mb permanent windows
swap file stayed on the uncompressed portion (along with other drivers and
such).

I have had no problems whatsoever. I have noticed no slowdown (other than it
takes a little longer to boot) either in windows or dos. So far I am a very
happy camper.

-Bruce
-- 
  Bruce F. Steinke                    | "Never know when you're going to
  bsteinke@dsd.es.com                 |  need a good piece of rope."
  Software Technical Support Engineer |               Sam Gamgee
  Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp.   |      <My mail, My Opinions>
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	I have been using DoubleDisk Gold for a little more than a month on
a 486DX 33Mhz, 120MB Seagate drive, running DOS & Windows in 386 enhanced
mode.
	I ran some tests and concluded that the speed of a DoubleDisk drive
with a drive read cache is about equal to the bare drive without a cache.
	I have no complaints about reliability.  It was very easy to install.
The only problem I had was with Castle Wolfenstein 3-D.  I assumed the game
was trying to bypass DOS disk access and moved the game to the non-compressed
region of the disk.  Since then the game has never given me a problem. 
There was never any damage to the DoubleDisk drive.
	Compression performance for the whole disk has held steady 
around 1.8:1.  This is lower than expected but about 20% (size) of my files 
are compressed image files and some large zip files.  

If you have any more specific questions let me know.
Dan
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I bought it an have been happy with it.  I use it on both MFM and IDE 40
MB drives.  I was using DoubleDisk before Gold came out.  That is the
same product MSDOS 6.0 is shipping with.  No problems with either
product.
