i was just wonderind about my ms dos 7.10 full version w/miniwin98gui on top. from mesasages i have read, there is a difference between the two dos? also, the mini98gui i have on top is faster than the systems on my !REAL! computer. is it because of the amount of ram on this 200mghz pentium mmx. 196mb of ram. and the only way i can say it in my limited comp vocabulary is, a very small and clean os? if so can you run a full 98 or 98se as a gui on top of ms dos 7.10 not windos 7.10?

First of all, Win98/98SE(a.k.a Windows 4.1) is a GUI on top of DOS. Mini-Windows 98 GUI is just the "lite" version of full Win98, that is, Win98 without Internet Explorer, DirectX, etc. The relationship between DOS and Win98 GUI is very similar to the one between DOS and Win3.1 GUI, or even the one between Linux/Unix and X-Window System(well, there is a version of X-Window that works on top of DOS, too).

Second, "WinDOS 7.1"(as called by some people) is actually a special and incomplete version of MS-DOS 7.10. For reasons only known to themselves, Microsoft made some changes(e.g. they added some block/extra codes and a 98LOGO inside IO.SYS) to the standard MS-DOS 7.10, and then they included this modified version of MS-DOS 7.10, namely "WinDOS 7.1", in the Win98 release, which is a DOS + Win98 GUI bindle, that's all.

Therefore, now you have MS-DOS 7.10(standard and standalone) full version available, you can run Win98/98SE as a GUI on top of standard MS-DOS 7.10 as well as earlier versions of Windows, like 3.x/95.