Brett Glass To The Rescue: Automatic Configuration for a Windows 95 Laptop

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Automatic Configuration for a Windows 95 Laptop

Q: Our company has laptops that must work in two different configurations -- one when they're on the LAN and another when they dial in or are not connected to any network. In MS-DOS 6.x, there was a way to set up a laptop to have multiple configurations; you could choose to load network drivers and protocol stacks when the laptop was docked and not when it was undocked. You could also make one configuration the default. The system had a count-down timer on it, so that a frequently used configuration would load automatically after a specified number of seconds. Windows NT 4.0 Workstation has similar functionality.

What happened to that functionality in Windows 95?

Trevor Vance

A: The menu feature is still there, and was in fact enhanced to let you choose a Windows 95 hardware profile at boot time. However, when it shipped Windows 95, Microsoft wanted to deprecate the use of DOS features. They also wanted to make Windows 95 look as if it wasn't built on top of a version of DOS anymore (even though it really is). So, the feature was somewhat of a secret until Paul Merenbloom mentioned it in his December 25, 1995 InfoWorld LAN Talk column. I followed up on Paul's advice with a concrete example about a year later; sample CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files appeared in my December 12, 1996 InfoWorld Help Desk column.

As you look at the sample CONFIG.SYS file in the latter column, pay special attention to the line that contains the command

MenuDefault=A-roving,5

This line is the one that does what you need! It specifies that the default hardware profile is "Undocked", and causes that item to be picked automatically if the user doesn't make an explicit choice within 5 seconds.