DOS

i'm running win xp mce 05 edition on a 160 gig hdd in my notebook and i don't necessarily see myself using that much space. my dos box crapped out and i was thinking of shrinking my windows partition and alloting a small amount to install freedos. in order to do this do  i need to install a bootloader? the only time i've ever really used one was running dual boot with linux and windows. if so which is a more recommended boot loader?

Why not use Virtual PC?

ZippyV said:

Why not use Virtual PC?

Crappy performance.

And I don't advise using modern computers to run old (pre-1996) DOS programs, particularly games: games of the time expected SoundBlaster-compatible cards; whilst pretty much every card from 1994 through 2001 was SB compatible with the de-facto standardisation of sound APIs in Windows there's no need to maintain compatibility with the original SoundBlaster; not even Creative's latest cards are compatible with the original SB.

You're better off ebaying for a machine from around 1999 for old-school games and apps, probably cheaper too.

W3bbo said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

Crappy performance.

And I don't advise using modern computers to run old (pre-1996) DOS programs, particularly games: games of the time expected SoundBlaster-compatible cards; whilst pretty much every card from 1994 through 2001 was SB compatible with the de-facto standardisation of sound APIs in Windows there's no need to maintain compatibility with the original SoundBlaster; not even Creative's latest cards are compatible with the original SB.

You're better off ebaying for a machine from around 1999 for old-school games and apps, probably cheaper too.

Crappy performance???? It's DOS FFS! Even using DOSBox, which is a complete emulator, still runs rings around the fastest DOS machines that were ever actually used.

And, ironically, your arguments against using a modern machine because of hardware issues are precisely the ones I would use to recommend Virtual PC.

my pc doesn't have the efficient hardware for running virtual machine. also alot of people i've talked to said freedos has a good compatability range with newer hardwares. i'm also not really using it for gaming and such and even if i payed some games they wouldn't be graphic extensive.

UB hans gunsche said:

my pc doesn't have the efficient hardware for running virtual machine. also alot of people i've talked to said freedos has a good compatability range with newer hardwares. i'm also not really using it for gaming and such and even if i payed some games they wouldn't be graphic extensive.

you can buy some software like Partition Commander that can make multi-boot very easy to do. it will even put up a menu of OS'es to boot.

you can also do it free with a bit of work, lookup "GRUB" used with Linux does the same thing.

UB hans gunsche said:

my pc doesn't have the efficient hardware for running virtual machine. also alot of people i've talked to said freedos has a good compatability range with newer hardwares. i'm also not really using it for gaming and such and even if i payed some games they wouldn't be graphic extensive.

To quote AndyC:

It's DOS FFS!

UB hans gunsche said:

my pc doesn't have the efficient hardware for running virtual machine. also alot of people i've talked to said freedos has a good compatability range with newer hardwares. i'm also not really using it for gaming and such and even if i payed some games they wouldn't be graphic extensive.

If it can run XP MCE, it can easily run DOSBox at full speed without any difficulty.

just incase the poster didn't get the message

dos box != dosbox

http://www.dosbox.com/ 

using the ctrl+f12 or some other combo (forget which) you can control the execution speed.