Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
>  I'd love to see what happens if I boot MS-DOS on my P4 2.53 GHz. How
> will it handle my video card? RAM? I suppose that 640K thing is there,
> but what if I want to use stuff like smartdrv and access higher memory?

You'll not run into trouble with *those*:

- Video cards are all still VGA compatible (if only to interface to the BIOS).

- RAM will be 1 MB, minus whatever is occupied by hardware; contiguous memory
will be 640K of course.

- XMS drivers like HIMEM.SYS used Intel's Protected Mode architecture to access
memory above 1 MB; of course the Protected Mode is still there in modern
processors.


However, you forgot one thing that could ruin your day:

.... do you have an old PS/2 keyboard, or is it USB already?

You may also want to think about whether you can access any of the installed
hard drives. NTFS won't do of course, but also FAT32 won't do. Forget LBA mode,
to be DOS-accessible your hard disk partition must be somewhere near the
beginning of the disk and small enough.


To be able to still play around with DOS, on my last computer (Pentium 4, 2GB) I
had installed one of those parallel-IDE-to-CompactFlash adapters, and used an
old 256MB CF card. That, combined with the old PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse,
did the job.

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