IBM is providing software for OS/2 WARP to assist customers concerned with the accuracy
of the Pentium floating point operations.  This software effectively "turns off" the 
floating point support of the Pentium processor.  This software detects the specific 
level of the Pentium chip and redirects applications to use floating point emulation. 
However, using floating point emulation can degradate the performance of your 
application(s). For typical spreadsheet and word processor applications, this degradation 
will be minimal.  For floating point-intensive applications, such as CAD, the degradation
will be more noticeable.  

For OS/2 Warp customers, this solution works for all OS/2, DOS, and
Windows applications.  This is provided as a device driver that directs application
floating point instructions to be executed by the available emulators including OS/2's
built-in emulator for OS/2 applications, the emulators either built into DOS or Windows
applications or the floating point emulator shipped as part of WINOS2 (OS/2's Windows 
support).  Because the application is "informed" that hardware floating point is not
available, applications that require hardware floating point support will not run.  
The solution completely prevents applications (DOS, Windows, and OS/2) from using the 
Pentium's floating point support.  

IBM is making this software available on most of the commercial on-line services, its 
own bulletin board systems, and across the Internet.  

To Install type DDINSTAL on the OS/2 command prompt and follow directions.  

This install will copy 586npx.sys to the os2 subdir,
and add a BASEDEV=586NPX.SYS line to your config.sys file.

586npx.sys  - will turn on the OS2 floating point emulator if it detects
              a pentium with a bad math co-processor.

If you want to at a later time enable your pentium math co-processor
you can REM out the statement in your config.sys that was added
during the installation, reboot and your Pentium chip will be reenabled
for floating point processes.  


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