You may prefer IDLE.COM from VPC for Win3, but it causes some DOS applications to become sluggish, such as the PowerBasic UI, because they don't expect INT 28 to sit around waiting for an interrupt. DOSIDLE works better for such DOS applications because idling only occurs during keyboard input wait states.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

You may prefer IDLE.COM from VPC for Win3, but it causes some DOS applications to become sluggish, such as the PowerBasic UI, because they don't expect INT 28 to sit around waiting for an interrupt. DOSIDLE works better for DOS applications because idling only occurs during keyboard input wait states.

You are right about idle.com from VPC. I had found the issue with Turbo C++ IDE. So I don’t put it in autoexec.bat, just run it when I need it. But it works for Windows 3.11 perfectly. I know DosBox has already somehow lowered CPU usage at prompt over years, but it would be great if Idle.ocm like feature also gets added to it.
I just checked DosIdle.exe, it did nothing to decrease CPU usage when BOOT used, weird.