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NTVDM speed (or lack thereof) (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 15.02.2011, 23:21

> [More DOS-topical : I never found a good DOS task switcher but for
> Windows itself. All DOS task switchers that I tried back then... were buggy
> or deficient or both. IIRC that included taskers from Norton, Central Point
> (when they had not yet become parts of the same entity), DRDOS's "tasmax",
> and more.
Desqview? But that's impossible to legally find nowadays. And BTW, wasn't TASKMAX old from DR-DOS 6? Novell DOS 7 / Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 has real pre-emptive multitasking (though requires its vaguely buggy EMM386) with TASKMGR, if you have a 386 (else task switching for 286). Not everything works, of course, but it's okay. In particular, 7.03 (and 7.02?) are closed source (natch), but at least their DPMI host (needed for multitasking) is much better, e.g. DJGPP and 32-bit friendly (finally).

RDOS claims to be GPL/non-commercial, and it supposedly multitasks and has a DPMI server and can even allegedly be built (now) with OpenWatcom. But I've never seen any mention of a recent binary (only raw disk image from a few years ago which I was apparently too dumb to figure out how to boot.) So you could try that (in theory) ....

> The only half acceptable thing came later, viz the task switcher
> included by MS with DOS 5 (?) and DOS 6.0 (retired from 6.2 iirc).
I assume you mean DOSSHELL, which appeared circa DOS 4. It only did task swapping, e.g. only one app at a time but saved the other in conv. mem. It wasn't discontinued (I think?) but was still definitely available in supplemental pack (DOSSUPL?). But yes, clearly they did want everyone to also buy Windows (esp. since they exclusively bundled DOS + Win = Win95).

> But of
> course the latter was a stripped down version or at least derived from the
> Windows 3.x (real or 'standard' mode) DOSSWAP and was OK. Now I'm not often
> finding myself praising something from Microshaft...]
I think Win 3.1 was better than DOSSHELL, but I haven't tested it lately to say for sure. At the very least, it allowed more than just conv. mem.

> Win 2k again : that question about controlling the time quantum - both
> globally AND per task (process, or thread maybe) is still open, if anyone
> lurking here has knowledge of hidden parameters (maybe from studying the
> so-called Research Kernel ?) I'll love to hear from them...
NT loses lots of ticks doing God knows what, and it doesn't always do the smartest thing. Worse is when antivirus or file indexing is running (or even Windows update), which slows everything to a crawl. It's much more obvious on single core PCs and/or with less than ideal amounts of RAM. It's clear that most people don't test very well across a wide variety of hardware. NT must be a bear to maintain because clearly they haven't organized everything (ahem, registry hack for DPMI limit? really?? 100% undocumented too, even better). That and the hardcoded filename flags for UAC really seemed inelegant to me. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

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