Huh?

1. Since when did they star hardwiring the first meg of RAM onto mobo's??
Even in the "good old days," when all they had was 1mb of RAM, that one
meg was not normally hardwired. I believe that "conventional memory" is
the first 1024kb (1mb) of RAM *recognized* by Windows, not some hardwired
memory on the mobo. check it out. [Why would mobo mfgrs hardwire 640kb or
1mb (1024kb) of memory on mobo's which might be used for other OS's which
do not use DOS as a basic OS - or, need to reserve such memory for
"System Resources," such as WinNT, Win2K, or WinXP?]

2. DOS. I believe Win95 still used DOS as a foundatioin, and it wasn't
until Win98 that DOS was bypassed by the Win OS. Even so, even with WinME
DOS is still available as a boot (and shell) option for troubleshooting
and correction.

3. Extended memory. RAM is all the Random Access Memory accessible, not
just Extended Memory RAM. The Extended Memory RAM is defined as all
available RAM above the first mb of "RAM," which was/is also *RAM.*
Extended Memory RAM was a term for RAm available as an extension to to
basic RAM, as compared to "Expanded Memory," which was a crude forerunner
to RAM the swap file.

4. What is "reverse compatibility?" (Compared to plain old
"compatibility?")

5. System resources reside in conventional RAM (the first 640kb of total
RAM - not the first xxxkb of extended RAM memory.) Not exactly. From what
I've learned recently from asking a lot of questions, Sys Resources are
chunks of conventional RAM - not some hardwired memory - reserved by the
Win OS for particular uses.

6. "Legacy System?" Please define. I thought "legacy" typically refered
to hardware. If not wouldn't Win3.x also be defined as a "legacy" OS - it
even used DOS to boot up.

7. If this messes up *your mind,* you might check out the public library.

jack payton

On Sat, 26 May 2001 22:59:18 -0400 Rick Lindstrom <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
> At 03:39 PM 5/26/2001 -0700, you wrote:
> >What confuses me is that if, as others have said, system resources
> is a set
> >amount of RAM specifically for that, then the percentage of
> resources it
> >takes up should go down as the amount of RAM goes up.
>
>
> You're thinking about "extended" memory, which is what the RAM you
> can plug
> into the motherboard is. System resources refers to the use of
> "conventional" memory, which is hard soldered to the motherboard and
> is
> never more than 1024k under Win9x because of the necessity of
> retaining
> reverse compatibility with legacy operating systems such as DOS. You
> can
> think of it as the first meg of memory if you want to.
>
> The point is that the conventional memory area is limited to 1024k
> no
> matter how much extended memory ("RAM") you plug in. And since the
> so-called "system resouces" only use (or reside in) conventional
> memory,
> you can add RAM until you break your pocketbook and it still will
> not
> increase the space available to "system resources". In reality,
> system
> resources only have part of conventional memory available to them,
> but
> that's another story.
>
> If this messes your mind up too much, switch to NT or 2000- these
> OS's
> treat all of the memory in a machine as one chunk and the
> limitations
> imposed by DOS/Win9x and "system resources" go away entirely.
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Rick Lindstrom
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Tallahassee, FL. USA
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
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