Re: [Freedos-user] Minor nit: Norton Utilities slow with FDAPM APMDOS; FDAPM APMOFF fixes.

[Eric A. <e....@jp...>]

Hi Shane,

I read your suggestions about hunting that FreeCOM bug where it
stops running programs, sounds good :-) Did you find a clue yet?

> Norton Text Search (ts.exe) prints about four characters a second
> when FDAPM APMDOS is running.  Setting FDAPM APMOFF fixes this.  This
> may also affect other Norton Utilities.
> 
> I suspect it's because FDAPM hooks an interrupt for power saving use
> that Norton was already using for something.
> 
> In my previous post that (the non-bug reports) that referred to
> Norton Utilities, I was not running FDAPM.

What FDAPM does is that it waits for the next IRQ when the pattern
of int calls suggests that the apps and kernel are also only waiting
for something. I remember one case where FDAPM APMDOS was too strong
and caused a delay: This was related to Novell DOS and int 28 idle
calls. The workaround is to use FDAPM ADV:REG instead of FDAPM APMDOS
which keeps most of the saving but ignores int 28 :-). Please let me
know if it also helps with your Norton Text Search / TS problem.

Note that using APMOFF or APMBIOS only gives minimal savings as they
only tell the BIOS to go to "energy wasting but high performance" or
"normal" mode respectively, without doing anything specific to DOS.

Eric