On 14 Apr 98 at 17:51, Marlin (SCOTT) Kline wrote:

>   I have a P 200 K-6 with 32 mg EDO, I have CD-ROM, Iomega Zip drive,
> Printer, Scanner, Sound Card. I have Office 97, Core Official 7,
> Photo Shop 2.0 and 4.0 installed. I am listing what I would consider
> the major software that could possibly any problems with memory. I
> am using Fat 32 and have a program called Agent 97  to help clean up
> memory leaks, if I remember correctly.

> My main problem at the moment is when I go to run and type command
> and then at the c:\> mem, I get the settings off of the
> Conventional 640k that 72k is being used and that 568k is free. If
> I go out to Dos and type mem at the c:\>, I get a different reading
> of 112k being used and 528 free. My first question is which of
> these two readings are correct, MS-DOS Prompt or DOS.

  The rather odd answer is that BOTH are correct.  When you go to
"MS-DOS Prompt", you're in a "DOS box" within Windows.  Since Windows
has its own drivers for various devices, you do not need to have DOS
drivers loaded in order to use CD-ROM, mouse and so on.  When you
exit to DOS, Windows drops out of the picture and so DOS drivers must
be loaded -- and they take up some DOS memory -- about 40K, in your
case.

> My second question is there a way to allocate the memory, also is
> there any programs that you can optimize the memory on a 32 bit
> system, in comparison as memmaker on the 16 bit system.

  You can, in fact, use memmaker under Win95.  I've found, however,
that it is less effective with OSR2; for things that need a lot of
DOS memory, I've used the Boot Manager software from Partition Magic
to configure a DOS boot partition.

> Another question, I am going to add a minimal of 32 mg to my system
> to bring it up to 64 mg, will that help the Conventional 640k, if
> not is there any way to increase that amount.

  No, that's not going to help.
  DOS was written for the 8086/8088, with a maximum address space of
1MB -- some of which IBM used for BIOS, video, and so on, leaving
640K.  The "DOS box" runs in a piece of the larger memory,
effectively limited to 1MB in order to work like an 8086.
  One of the early attempts to expand beyond 640KB of conventional
memory was EMS: Expanded Memory System.  You can configure Win95 to
provide EMS memory to DOS applications that know how to take
advantage of it, but those are likely to be the exception rather than
the rule.

> If I were to add two 32 mg in stead of two 16 mg of memory,
> bringing it up to 96 mg. Would I have to do a reinstall for Windows
> to reallocate the memory.

  No, reinstalling isn't necessary.  You might or might not want to
do this, though.  My desktop and home machines are supposed to handle
more than 64MB of memory just fine, but at home I had to adjust some
CMOS settings and at work I had to add a "tag RAM" chip.  Many other
machines slow down a bit when fitted with more than 64MB of RAM -- up
to 15% in some specific cases.

> I am having memory problems without running applications, just
> using the browser, I get a red icon from Agent 97 stating memory
> resources are dangerously low.

  Resources are a special case.  Win95 tries to do a good job of
allowing lots of memory for resources, but they have to be accessible
to any 16-bit Windows applications you might run, and so there's a
limit on how much space they can take up.  Adding more memory won't
increase that.
  Browsers in particular seem to be bad about "leaking" -- not
releasing memory and resources back to the OS when they're done with
them.  There may be a newer browser version available that's better
about this than what you are using.

> I can only scan about 4-5 photos at a time and have to restart
> Windows, is adding memory is the solution.? My PC has became very
> slow.

  I'm not entirely certain what you mean by "scanning"; it's not
something I do with a browser.  But it sounds like adding RAM is, at
best, going to move you up to 8-10 photos, and probably not even
that.  I think making better use of the RAM you have is going to be
more effective than adding RAM.

  Suggestions:  Upgrade browser to a newer version.  [Not necessarily
newest; i.e., if you have 3.01, you might prefer 3.02 (fixed bugs and
leaks) rather than 4.x.]  Install APK -- now a commercial product
called "RamCharge" -- which recovers most leaked memory and possibly
also resources.

David G