I've got this Dell Latitude cpi, a P2 300 with a 40GB 5400RPM IDE HD and 64MB EDO RAM. It uses a 440BX chipset and a Crystal 4326B sound card. Sound works fine in dos games. It's running Win98 but I generally play in DOS alone.

My problem is that, sporadically when playing a number of DOS games, when new resources are loaded (animations, sounds, etc) the HD light lights up, everything just stops for up to a second, and then the game continues and plays/shows the loaded resource. It's clearly not EVERY resource, as the game might run fine for some time before it starts doing this. It feels like memory is filling up or something, but Wolf3d should easily run on this machine. I've tried various tricks, like HD caching (smartdrv, various DOS UDMA33 enabler/cache systems), and I've tried running the games through Windows. Utilities all tell me that UDMA33 is enabled for the HD. It doesn't matter if I run any memory managers or not.

I also have a 486DX66 w/16MB RAM and an old 4GB HD that runs Doom without any stutters. I'm not sure what aspect of the Dell laptop is causing this problem. I did not notice any stuttering in Quake, strangely, but Doom, Duke3d, and Wolf3d are all experiencing this issue.

I upgraded the HD from a 6GB to the 40GB and the newer drive helped a bit, and I think increasing the DOS BUFFERS improves things as well, so I went a little overboard with that. I can now get ~80-90% through a Duke3d level without the stuttering starting up. Once it starts, it happens fairly often.

Autoexec.bat:

1LH c:\dos\ctmouse.exe
2LH c:\dos\shsucdx.com /d:MSCD001
3LH c:\sound\cwdinit.exe /v

Config.sys:

1DEVICE=C:\windows\himem.sys
2DEVICE=C:\windows\emm386.exe NOEMS
3DOS=HIGH,UMB
4
5FILES=80
6BUFFERS=90
7STACKS=9,256
8DEVICEHIGH=c:\dos\VIDE-CDD.sys /D:MSCD001

Thank you.