I've heard of and used DOS Box. It's much easier to run a DOS game in DOS Box than it is to run it in the original kernel when you have a newer machine (his shitty laptop qualifies as a newer machine in this case) because you can slow down the CPU cycles for the app and it will emulate your hardware (most notably video and audio) to look like DOS/Windows 95 era hardware. I can run Wing Commander I-IV fine in DOS Box using Windows 2000 or Windows XP on any machine, but don't even get me started on having to fight with the computer to get it running using the integrated DOS kernel...and this isn't even a recent computer, this is an old Athlon K6-2 450MHz running, you guessed it, Windows 2000.
As for XP patches to old games, nope, never heard of them. I've needed patches to run a game in Windows 2000 properly (see Battlezone II), but never for XP.
Aside from all that, Windows XP is basically an extension of Windows 2000 anyways.
@ThePlague: what are your current specs?
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