I tried to use desqview but it was too slow on my 386 33mhz machine… not sure how much RAM it had back then but I recall it was the bottleneck and swapping to disk caused everything to lag.
DESQview did not do any memory management of its own, and it did not use graphics. It was entirely local and had no networking. It was famously fast. It was a DOS multitasker so it managed DOS tasks, meaning multiple slots of 640kB. On a 386 with 4MB of RAM you could have 6 full-size DOS VMs with a bit left over.
If you were a power user you could still have say a big 1-2-3 spreadsheet in EMS plus a few DOS VMs.
DESQview delegated memory management to QEMM386, and QEMM386 did not do swapping. It didn't need to.
DESQview/X was a totally different product, with a full GUI, so much bigger and slower -- and it added an optional extension that added full virtual memory with swapping to disk.
I am wondering if you are mixing up DESQview (small, fast, local) with DV/x (big, complicated, networked, had optional VM)?
Or indeed DV/x with something else altogether? OS/2 maybe?
Because if it was swapping, it wasn't DESQview, not in any normal sane config anyway. It might be possible to add DV/x VM to plain old DESQview but I never heard of anyone doing that.
lproven|11 months ago
DESQview did not do any memory management of its own, and it did not use graphics. It was entirely local and had no networking. It was famously fast. It was a DOS multitasker so it managed DOS tasks, meaning multiple slots of 640kB. On a 386 with 4MB of RAM you could have 6 full-size DOS VMs with a bit left over.
If you were a power user you could still have say a big 1-2-3 spreadsheet in EMS plus a few DOS VMs.
DESQview delegated memory management to QEMM386, and QEMM386 did not do swapping. It didn't need to.
DESQview/X was a totally different product, with a full GUI, so much bigger and slower -- and it added an optional extension that added full virtual memory with swapping to disk.
I am wondering if you are mixing up DESQview (small, fast, local) with DV/x (big, complicated, networked, had optional VM)?
Or indeed DV/x with something else altogether? OS/2 maybe?
Because if it was swapping, it wasn't DESQview, not in any normal sane config anyway. It might be possible to add DV/x VM to plain old DESQview but I never heard of anyone doing that.