Can normal DOS viruses work under MS Windows?
Most of them cannot. A system that runs exclusively MS Windows is, in general, more virus-resistant than a plain DOS system. The reason is that most resident viruses are not compatible with the memory management in Windows. Furthermore, most of the existing viruses will damage the Windows applications if they try to infect them as normal EXE files. The damaged applications will stop working and this will alert the user that something is wrong. However, virus-resistant is by no means virus-proof. For instance, most of the well-behaved resident viruses that infect only COM files (Cascade is an excellent example), will work perfectly in a DOS window. All non-resident COM infectors will be able to run and infect too. And currently there exists at least one Windows-specific virus which is able to properly infect Windows applications (it is compatible with the NewEXE file format). Any low level trapping of Interrupt 13, as by resident boot sector and MBR viruses, can also affect Windows oper
Related Questions
- Will MS Windows programs typically run faster or slower under UNIX and Wine than they do under DOS and MS Windows? Will certain kinds of programs run slower or faster?
- Do I need to have a DOS partition on my system to use Wine? Does MS Windows need to be loaded into that partition in order to run MS Windows programs under Wine?
- Can normal DOS viruses work under MS Windows?
