So I was asked today if DOS would run on Vista, as both a consultant and staff IT manager stated that it would not. My gut was to say "Yes, of course it will run," but I wanted to make sure my gut wasn't lying to me. So here's how I wasted an hour of my day:
Microsoft says:
Q: Will my MS-DOS applications continue to run under Windows Vista without modification?
A: Yes, they will.
Great, thanks a lot Redmond. But still, that’s a good start. Since there will be two flavors of Vista architecture, 32-bit and 64-bit - and as I have heard rumors that there will not be an included cmd emulator (DOS emulator) in the 64-bit version (and I could see this being true, but I do not believe that MS will turn its back on DOS apps, not yet at least) I've worked up some options.
- Stay on XP/2000. XP Pro was released on 12/31/2001 (here), and their policy is 10 years of support (here) which keeps you fine until the start of 2012.
- Move to Vista and run dosbox. dosbox has been used by gamers to run old dos games for quite sometime, and works on Vista. The guys at ExtremeTech did a write-up on it back in May 2006, and the only issues they found then were with graphics drivers (that legacy, non-gaming DOS apps wouldn’t require in most all cases).
- Move to Vista and run DOS in a VMWare (corp site) or Microsoft Virtual PC environment. Most thorough compatibility chart evar, here.
- Use one of the numerous other virtual machines that supports DOS.
That’s about as thorough of an analysis as I could pull off in less than 60 minutes of wasted time I don't have. Looks like both their consultant and the staff IT guy are falling a bit short a bit off the mark mental midgets.
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