Re: Refresh rates (XyDos in XP Window)

[John Negus jxz@xxxxxxxx]

michael.norman@xxxxxxxx wrote:

> .. I'm
> guessing -- only guessing -- that it's the way the OS controls or
> mitigates the hardware and its speed, not the actual speed itself.

The way I look at it is that every OS does some managing of
time. It does it by allocating quantities of it to the
different units requiring it - including itself. (And
inside the OS, there are ways whereby hardware can make
immediate - not programmed - claims for time: keyboards do
it, for one.)

In the days of Dos, there were in theory only two software
units in question - the OS, the current program. But of
course resident programs came in, then programs like Xy
split themselves into different threads and allotted some
of their allocation to each of them - to do printing for
instance.

With modern OSes, time is a much bigger management item.
Ideally, of course, the user doesn't see it - everything
works well enough that we're not aware of the ticking under
the hood. Now and again, though, the OS doesn't allocate
whatever is needed to maintain the illusion. The jerkiness
in a dos box might come as much from inadequate total time
as from inadequate numbers of slices of time or inadequate
average length of slice .. The answer probably lies in altering
the values the OS uses in its allocations. 

That said, the problem of too much speed is another one
altogether.

John

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