a question about DOS emulation in Win XP

[KRFinch at dstsystems.com]

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