a question about DOS emulation in Win XP

[Brian Densmore]

Or you could buy a real copy of DOS. IBM still makes it and sells it.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. Guaranteed to be far faster than
an emulator version. Also Y2K compliant, and I believe it also is
capable of 32 bit protected mode operation.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: KRFinch at dstsystems.com [mailto:KRFinch at dstsystems.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 4:34 PM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: a question about DOS emulation in Win XP
> 
> 
> 
> SUPPOSEDLY, the DOS emulator in WinXP is far better and more 
> compatible
> than those in Win2k, NT, or even ME.  I was shown a 
> screenshot once of Doom
> running in a window under XP, something that would cause any of the
> previously mentioned Win versions to crash.  No experience 
> with it myself,
> but if I had to guess based on what I have read, I would say 
> that a simple
> DOS program would likely run fine under WinXP.
> 
> That having been said, I wonder why on earth anyone would pay 
> so much for
> something to have to do so little.  (I guess if you had to 
> buy a new PC,
> and XP was preinstalled as a part of the "Microsoft Tax 
> Package", but other
> than that...)  In any case, the program would probably work 
> equally well
> under Win95's or 98's DOS mode, and either of those could be 
> had used for
> less than a tenth of the price of XP.   It would probably run 
> faster too,
> and on slower hardware.  WinXP is a P-I-G, and you need about 
> an 800Mhz
> processor and 256MB of RAM to get reasonable performance out 
> of it.  You
> can get acceptable performance (with many 
> non-graphic-intensive programs)
> in Win95's DOS mode on a non-MMX P-50 with 32MB installed.  
> Depending on
> the program, you could probably run it under DOS in Win3.11 
> on a 486 and
> still get acceptable performance.
> 
> As a footnote, the Gartner Group found WinXP to be 30% more resource
> intensive than Win2k in all areas.  Win2k was about 50% more resource
> intensive than WinNT4.0 in similar tests.  That P-350 might 
> have been a
> screamer with NT4.0, but these days it has a hard time running Office.
> Food for thought...
> 
> Hope this helps!
> 
> Kevin Finch
> Network Administrator
> DST Systems, Inc.
> 816/435-6039
> krfinch at dstsystems.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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