The A20 line is for memory addressing.  I barely remember,
but I think it was a weird way to address memory beyond
the capacity of the old 16 bit address registers on old 8086
cpus to reference directly.  I think it was last used only in
IBM OS/2, so I suspect your terminal emulators are responsible.
You could look in CMOS to see if you have any reference
to a20 enabled / disabled, and I would consult himem.sys help
because there is a switch you could load explicitly with the
command device=himem.sys /A20Control:ON
in the config.sys file.
Tom Turak


----------
From:Jose E. Dominguez
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 5:29 PM
That's real interesting since the A20 line has got to do with the keyboard. Are
you using an external keyboard when the error occurs?
HTH,
Jose

Donald Rex Gaither wrote:

> Hi,
> I have a weird problem on a Compaq Presario 1610 laptop.  I recently
> installed Windows 98 (upgrade CD, clean install).  It is now giving a
> "Himem.sys cannot control the A20 line" error whenever I restart.  Powering
> off and turning it back on works fine, though.  It started after I installed
> several programs (unfortunately, the company I work at uses a program to
> install the programs over the network, so I don't know which specific
> program caused it to start acting up).  The programs are MS Office 97 Pro,
> NAV 4.0, Reflection 1 and 8 (terminal emulators), and Lotus Notes 4.5b.  Any
> ideas?

> Donald Gaither

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