Windows 3.1x natively supports proper power management

[kveroneau]

Hello All,

I was on these forums many many years ago, back then I had a username in the old forum software, but since Oracle moved over to SSO, I never got around to changing that BB account over, so this is a brand-new account I took the time to create today.

This is going to be a very short thread with a nice screenshot showing you how to enable Windows 3.1x native power management support, which essentially prevents the Virtual Machine from taking 100% of your CPU resources. Since this is a native Windows feature, no extra software/downloads/tricks/etc are required.

Most threads here have been pointing to the 100% CPU resource hog as being an ACPI problem in older versions of Windows. Where there appears to be a simple solution provided with a Windows 98 tutorial, basically running setup.exe to force an ACPI Windows kernel. First a brief history of power management in general. Back before ACPI was born, there was there laptop standard called APM or Automatic Power Management. I had an older Windows 95 laptop awhile back that used APM rather than ACPI. VirtualBox appears to support both standards. The nice DOS utility called DOSIDLE which I am very sure this community knows very well, uses APM to make the guest machine in DOS not take up all your CPU cycles. Since Windows 3.1x was available back in the old laptop days, they also support the APM standard, not the ACPI standard. Here's how to enable it in your Windows setup program. If you have already installed Windows 3.1, you can run it's setup.exe from pure DOS to enter this screen you will see below:

Can't post an image yet with my new account, I'll update this post tomorrow and place the images here.
visit iamkevin.ca/myCloud/Albums/5/ for now.

And here is what will appear inside your Control Panel:
Can't post an image yet with my new account, I'll update this post tomorrow and place the images here.

This is also why when some people said they installed Linux on their laptop back in the day and it drained the battery quicker than Win98, under older versions of Linux you are required to run modprobe apm duh! Linux, like Windows back in the day supported APM. Windows had the benefit of auto-detecting it better.

[mpack]

There's no need to post image links. You can attach images directly here - even a first time poster is allowed to do that.

[michaln]

DOS has been shipping POWER.EXE since 5.x, and it's been part of every MS-DOS and PC DOS 6.0/6.1 release. And obviously APM support is standard in Windows 3.1. The only non-obvious thing is that Windows 3.1 setup does not enable APM support automatically, but everyone surely knows that?

[kveroneau]

DOS has been shipping POWER.EXE since 5.x, and it's been part of every MS-DOS and PC DOS 6.0/6.1 release. And obviously APM support is standard in Windows 3.1. The only non-obvious thing is that Windows 3.1 setup does not enable APM support automatically, but everyone surely knows that?

I can definitely say that MS-DOS's POWER.EXE helps with CPU usage as well. I am going to compare the usage of both POWER.EXE and the popular DOSIDLE.EXE in various situation, such as opening EDIT which always raises the CPU back to full blast when run. EDIT uses an entire core regardless if using POWER.EXE or DOSIDLE.EXE. No remorse here. With POWER.EXE sitting at just the prompt with SB16 and SmartDrv being the only things installed, has my quad-core sit at 1% usage for that VBox process. DOSIDLE.EXE also leaves it at 1% usage.