MS-DOS guest on XP runs extremely slow

Duncan Blackthorne · Post by **Duncan Blackthorne** » 26. Jan 2009, 20:16

I created an MSDOS 6.22 system so I can run an old Microsoft assembler (which won't run directly under XP) to assemble software for legacy systems here at work. I've got it all running, but it takes about 30 minutes to run the whole assembly/linking process, whereas it takes only about a minute on the Pentium 3/Win98 system it's all copied from. Why is it running so slow, and what if anything can I do to improve the performance? The host system is an AMD Athlon 64 based system.

Post by **ghr** » 26. Jan 2009, 21:04

Which MASM ? Just for comparison: running some experiments on a VB Win95 VM gave me a 25% performance (CPU intensive job with some IO) compared to native hardware at 166 MHz - and host is WinXP 2.4 GHz single core

. So if you take the clock into account as well the slowdown factor is approaching 60 ! Somehow I thought that DOS was doing better but I'm not sure. Based on other experiences you could also check memory setup and linking but to be honest: I dont have a clue what that would do for you.

Post by **vbox4me2** » 26. Jan 2009, 21:16

Have a look at tame(-res).com an old dos tool from the stoneage

Post by **ghr** » 26. Jan 2009, 22:51

Guess the suggestion is to look at tamedos.com... Makes me realise that I silently assumed that you (Duncan) are using something like dosidle.