This version of AV Defs Updater for F-PROT(r) for DOS(r) is 2.9. It contains the following improvements over version 2.8:

 * We have been significantly disappointed with FreeDOS, the freely usable and distributable DOS (website: http://www.freedos.org). Version 1.0, the supposedly stable, non-beta version, has exhibited significant instabilities during the time we tested it. That is why we have taken the decision to remove the product's dependency on FreeDOS, at least for the time being. On the bright side, the product now enables the easy usage of any DOS. The boot disk creation capability/procedure has been replaced with one to augment an existing boot disk supplied by the user. The user does not necessarily need to supply a bootdisk, although that can be very convenient for the user, because the procedure can operate on any diskette with about 700 KB of available disk space.

We came to realise that the observed instabilities of FreeDOS version 1.0 may also cause data loss or corruption. While we do not think that we have observed any data loss or corruption, our advice right now is not to use FreeDOS unless you really need it. We would like this to change in the future, so we can use FreeDOS again, so we will re-test FreeDOS in some time, and inform you about it.

* Note that some of our DOS batch files on the FreeDOS boot disk that you may have found useful, e.g. RAMDISK.BAT, are not included, because they are specific to FreeDOS or other tools that are not provided any more. If you need them, you can find them in the previous version of AV Defs Updater, or you can email us with a request to give them to you.

* The install-free creation/updating of antivirus definitions (through UP.EXE) required writing a very small file to the disk (diskette) from which it is being run. This was a regression from the intended behaviour from a couple of versions ago, and is now fixed.

* Made the messages prompting for diskette insertion more informative and better warning people of potential dangers (such as erasure, overwriting). Corrected some potentially misleading messages (e.g. during install-free creation/updating of antivirus definitions /through UP.EXE/).

* The program now cleans up after itself much better in case of errors in certain scenarios, e.g. creation of the emergency disk set.

* Several reliability fixes, isolating temporary files created by the program very well from temporary files of other programs, avoiding clashes; fixing error handling not present in a few cases.