A bit off-topic but I thought I'd see if anyone can answer this definitively:

A client used to have a mix of Win 3.x and W95 OSR2 machines on a Novell 3.12 network. They primarily use a DOS accounting system. They have some reports that took 20 minutes and up to run, even on the faster W95 boxes. On those boxes, they would start the report, then Alt-Tab over to Word, Excel etc. and let the report finish in the background, which it would do successfully.

About 8 months ago, they replaced all of the Win3.x/W95 machines with new Dell 400MHz Celerons with Win98SE. Generally, everything works very well, except that the DOS Accounting system will no longer process reports in the background. On these machines, the reports are suspended as soon as the DOS box is switched to the background. If it is switched back to the foreground, the report processing resumes.

With W98SE at least 2 factors seem to be at play:

1. In the program shortcut there is an "Always suspend" check box which will suspend the task if it is not the foreground task. (I don't know if the phrasing is exactly correct, I don't have a W98 box in front of me to check).

2. Globally, there is an "Idle Sensitivity" setting that seems to control how soon a task receives timeslices once the system is deemed to be "idle".

IAC, the client has worked through a matrix of all possible combinations of these two settings, with no effect. He has been on the phone with Dell several times; they are trying to tell him that MS does not guarantee that MS-DOS apps will run under W98, so Dell has no obligation to help them fix this "problem".

My understanding is that W98SE should be able to allocate timeslices to DOS boxes running as background tasks. Can anyone confirm that this is correct?

I suspect that Dell has somehow "tweaked" its OEM distribution of W98SE on these machines so that background DOS boxes don't get timeslices (maybe to improve benchmark test results ??). I'm going in to the client tomorrow, to speak with Dell on their behalf and get to the bottom of this.

I'd just like to be sure that W98SE is indeed capable of doing what we want it to do before I go in with guns blazing :-)