[TriLUG] OT: legacy 16bit DOS programs on Win2k

[Jeff Jackowski]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 ryan.wheaton at attbi.com wrote:

>Sup y'all.
>
>I know that this is off topic, but i'm googled out and i figured maybe someone 
>here has run into this as well.
>
>we have an old 16bit DOS app that management has decided to bring back and 
>employ company wide (tomorrow), and I'm trying to figure out a way to best do 
>this.
>
>The program (EasyRes) is a CPU HOG.  I mean, when you're in it and running, 
>NTVDM (the win2k dos virtual machine) uses 100% of the processor 100% of the 
>time.

I don't know anything about that particular DOS app, but I do know that
many DOS apps poll for input such that they use all the CPU's time while
idle. If that is the case here, you may not have much of a performance
problem if you keep the process's priority from being so high it
interferes with other apps. If an idle DOS app runs slower, you probably
won't notice the DOS app going much slower at all. OS/2 has a few options
for DOS that make this problem moot, but MS had little incentive to
support DOS well.

Good luck!

-- 
Jeff Jackowski
        http://ro.com/~jeffj/