Thank you Andrew
This is very helpful but I am not there yet. I am wanting to get old
Borland Pascal running faster and also .exe apps created with BP.
I do not see them in Task Manager.
Is there a way to do it?
Andrew McLaren wrote:
Quote:
> "RetroMIDI" <murray.r.3@xxxxxx> wrote ... Quote:
> > Is there a way under Vista so I can give a DOS window a very high
> > priority so it gets most of the machine cycles?
>
> Yes and No.
>
> The "DOS window" is displayed by an instance of CMD.EXE. It is quite
> straightforward to go into Task Manager, find CMD.EXE in the list of running
> processes, and increase its priority. You can also star a new instance of
> CMD.EXE (or any other program) by using the START command:
>
> C:\>start /HIGH cmd
>
> But! I'm pretty sure that this is not actually what you want to achieve. If
> you set CMD.EXE to run at a high priority, so what? CMD itself is not a
> CPU-intensive activity; quite the opposite. Mostly you open a Command Prompt
> window because you want to run other programs from it. Maybe you want to
> start other programs with a high priority?
>
> If you start an app from a high priority CMD window, the spawned app does
> not automatically inherit the high priority. So if you start Notepad (for
> example) from a a high priority CMD window, that instance of Notepad will
> run with Normal priority.
>
> It's very likely that you want to give priority to some application, not to
> the Command Prompt window itself. As above, you can do this is the usual
> manner: just use Task Manager, or start the target application with a "start
> /HIGH" command.
>
> Note also that giving a process a High priority does *not* mean the process
> will get most of the machine cycles. There is no guarantee that this will
> happen. The priority means that the Windows Dispatcher will tend to schedule
> threads for that process, in preference to threads for other processes at
> lower priorities. If two processes have similar workload characteristics,
> then the one running at a higher priority will probably tend to get more CPU
> time, over a period. But priority does not directly allocate CPU time to a
> process.
>
> Finally (and just to be pedantic), it isn't a "DOS" window. DOS is an
> obsolete, single tasking, 16-bit operating system. When you open a Command
> Prompt window on Windows NT (including 2000, XP and Vista) you are running a
> native, 32-bit process which calls does into the NT kernel; there's no DOS
> involved. The Command Prompt does bear a superficial resemblance to the
> command.com of old (and in fairness, even some Microsoft docs occasionally
> refer to it erroneously as a "DOS window" ... sloppy tech writers).
>
> Hope it helps,
>
> --
> Andrew McLaren
> amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au