On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Wagner Lipnharski wrote: Don't panic. *>Microsoft is failing in a tremendous way regarding industrial application. *>There is not a simple way to dedicate all the processor power to one *>application, you will have always the Microsoft lack of knowledge of real *>multi-task operation at your ankles. If there is just one application *>running, why in the heck the processor needs to keep being interrupted? to *>check if there is another application trying to launch? and what about it I *>want to lock just one application? simply can't. Read about the Microsoft scheduler and how it bumps priorities of idle processes from time to time and event-driven. I understood what it does after reading that info. Then I understood that I was trying to build something impossible because of that scheduler. It is a totally nondeterministic state machine. You have to read about how it works to understand. Now you can panic. Any timing-sensitive applications fielded ? *>It is messing up with several, thousands, millions of worldwide *>applications that depend on specific timed pulses on ports (most LPT *>ports). It is ridiculous to force customers to keep running old versions *>of Windows or even DOS platform. In some way, Microsoft is putting our of *>business several old partners, people who developed applications under *>windows, and now it simply doesn't work under the new versions. Ah, yes, the scheduler works differently under 95, 98, 2k and XP. That is also explained in the same document. *>temperature application, it can means many thousands of dollars lost, and *>bill will not want to be sued hundreds of times a day... True, that's why they have the EULA. Read it carefully. Free software may come without warranty etc but some M$ products legally and certifiedly come without it imho. BTW on Linux the scheduler can be manipulated to do plain Round-Robin preemptive multitasking and other things and there are real time kernel patches. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics