I doubt that dosbox is to blame
maybe your pc overheated ? Did you overclock it or so ?

No, DOSBOX did not crash your machine... It is a relatively simple program, which does not install anywhere deeper into system (no shared DLLs, no drivers).
And in any case: no program should ever destroy hardware (I understand that your comp does not work at all). Well, there were some viruses - but that's different.
When you go with you daughter in your car and it suddenly breaks down, do you blame her for breaking the car?

Mirek

Try this:

1.- Unplug your Vaio from any power adapter.
2.- Pull off the battery of your computer.
3.- Wait some seconds... or some minutes...
4.- Put on the battery and try to turn on the computer.

I don't believe DOSBox is related to your problem... it could be a hardware problem or a windows crash.

I think it overheated. I waited a while for it to cool down to restart it, but it never restarted. I went through a troubleshooting procedure on the phone with a computer tech person from Circuit City Computer Support Plus. There was nothing that got the computer started. I sent it to get it fixed. Hopefully the hard disk is alright. I can't do a darn thing about it if the data was lost. I thought DOSbox was good for playing games. It worked nicely. I know that it didn't cause a Windows crash. The thing overheated or something went wrong with the hardware.

yeah dosbox uses a lot of cpu power.
If you have a cooling problem then when you run dosbox it might show up.

Well, even computers die now and then...

Well, if I try to use DOSbox ever again when I get the computer running again, do you recommend using a different setting (other than default) ?

Not really. Download a program like SpeedFan or Motherboard Monitor and see if it can monitor your computer internal temperature and/or CPU temperature while using DosBox.

vaio: expensive crap. 😀
I would have suggested applying pressure to the memory sockets to see if that got it working. Those solder joints go bad all the freaking time.