It is true that Activestate perls have no capability and if you absolutly must use Activestate then alarm is no supported. However on the perl that comes with the cygwin system (running Win98) I ran your code and other basic uses of an alarm with exactly the same behaviour as on my linux system.

In case you don't know it, cygwin runs on most windows platforms and has a pile of modular components including the a good selection of those utilities missing from a non unix system: perl, grep, bash, gcc, tar, wget, and many more.

Cygwin also allows you to compile many perl modules without depending on ppm like Activestate, though in using it some modules avalible in the ppm archives are very difficult/impossible to get to work.

If you are going to be installing perl on many systems anyway then cygwin may be a good option to explore.