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Performance tuning DOS apps in W2K

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by deubster

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We have a small network with an NT 4.0 server and 4 workstations. One of our critical applications is a DOS app on the server. We recently upgraded one workstation to Windows2000 Professional. Win2000 runs the program DRAMATICALLY SLOWER than before, and much slower than the other Win95 & Win98 workstations.

The workstation is a PIII/500 with 192 Mb RAM and plenty of available disk space. The NIC is 10/100. Performance is good on Windows programs, and used to be good in DOS on this machine when it ran Win98.

I know I've seen an article somewhere on optimizing DOS programs on Win2K Pro, but I can't seem to find it. Can anybody help?

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by timthetoolman

Hi,

The following articles from Microsoft will help you to troubleshoot this problem

support.microsoft.com

Q165214
Q161564

Type the Q numbers into the search field to bring up the relevent articles.

Amongst other things, there are configurations you can make to the win2k equivalent of the autoexec.bat and config.sys

BUT... you should know that Win2k handles DOS programs in a VERY different way to Win98 and Win95.

They're run in a "virtual machine" on win2k - within the NTVDM process if you look in the task list.

You can make some changes at the icon that starts it too. Like whether it runs in its own NTVDM process or shares it with other DOS processes. I'm not sure whether this was mentioned in the articles, so I thought I should mention it...

Hope you fix it.
Cheers,
Tim.

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