Idling under MS-DOS 4.01 & Windows 3.0

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Well I was playing some more with my MS-DOS setup, and the annoying thing is that it doesn’t idle worth anything.

And of course running old DOS doesn’t help that most everything needs MS-DOS 5.0 or higher.

But then I found WQGHLT, which is a VXD to support idling under Windows 3.1.  And happily it works on Windows 3.0 …

The only pain is that running MS-DOS applications kills the CPU (again).  Which means that the DOS programs themselves need to idle.  And yes I did check the ‘detect idle’ but it seems that it doesn’t do what I’d hope.

Maybe it’s just the software, I should try some more and see what I get.

3 thoughts on “Idling under MS-DOS 4.01 & Windows 3.0”

  2. The VxD most likely only works for Windows applications. For DOS apps to support idling under Windows, a POWER.EXE equivalent must be loaded and effective before Windows is loaded. And then the DOS app you’re running must support idling implicitly or explicitly. If it sits in a tight loop and polls some registers or whatever, the power management software is foiled.

  3. Thanks!

    That certainly did it, a combination of ‘idle’ from Virtual PC 2004’s MS-DOS extensions, and the VXD let’s me fire up 4 synchronet nodes without issue. Granted synchronet also has the ability to do some dos idle code as well but it’s WAY better behaved running it in the base MS-DOS. I was thinking for some reason it’d run better in each VM, but that didn’t work so well..

    I’ll have to mess around with it some more, but my latest experiment is adding stacker into the mix.

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