Soft real-time acquisition in Windows XP

In the paper we present two possible approaches for a soft real-time acquisition under Windows XP. The first approach is based on a high priority thread and the second one on a local advanced programmable interrupt controller (LAPIC). Robustness was evaluated on unloaded and loaded system. In order to assess real-time system performance we analyzed sampling time histograms and maximum timing error. Both approaches perform satisfactory on unloaded system. On loaded system LAPIC approach shows better robustness. Although sampling time histograms show bigger errors on loaded systems than on unloaded systems, maximum timing error does not change significantly for the LAPIC approach.