Command prompt different 'mem' sizes ?

[Andrew Kennard]

Hi all

I've tried googling for this info and have not mangied to find anything.

We have serveral XP home machines that when I open the command prompt and
type mem /c the COMMAND and SYSTEM show different sizes ?

This wouldn't normally be a big problem but we have some 'DOS' apps that
need large amounts of base memory and the tiny difference in these files
seem to make a big difference to the available base memory. I presume this
is because the blocks of upper memory have been shuffled around

Thanks in advance for any advise

Andrew Kennard

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I find this site very useful.

http://www.dosgames.com/xphints.php#3

Regards,

TimH

 

[Alex Nichol]

I've tried googling for this info and have not mangied to find anything.

We have serveral XP home machines that when I open the command prompt and
type mem /c the COMMAND and SYSTEM show different sizes ?

This wouldn't normally be a big problem but we have some 'DOS' apps that
need large amounts of base memory and the tiny difference in these files
seem to make a big difference to the available base memory.

For best DOS conventional memory, edit the windows\system32\config.nt
and autoexec.nt files.

In config.nt have (apart from the large number of REM lines) just
EMM = B=4000 RAM
(note the exact spaces - either side of the first = and before RAM,
none next to the second =) and

dos=high, umb
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
files=40
(or higher files= if needed)

and in autoexec.nt have

REM Install DPMI support
lh %SystemRoot%\system32\dosx

with other earlier lh lines REM ed out, and then any SET or PATH lines
that may already be present at the end.

This should give about 612K for a program, run from a shortcut made to
its .exe file. R-click the shortcut, Properties and on the Memory page
you can set an explicit value - rather than Auto - for any EMM or XMS
memory it may need, and for initial environment space

Note that command.com is an old DOS 5 16 bit program run under this
while cmd.exe is the 32 bit emulated command environment