Where's my memory ?
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Joined: Feb 2000
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From: Wishing it was somewhere sunny!
Where's my memory ?
My computer was slow and hanging requiring me to either shut down some windows or re- boot the computer. I downloaded a little programme ( coolbeans system info from www.coolbeans.com) and saw that my processor was running at 95-100% memory capacity with swap files at 5-15%. I purchased an additional 128MB SDRam chips but lo and behold, no improvement so on the advice of the supplier, I changed these for 2x64MB SDRam memory chips but that brought around no improvement. I have formatted my hard drive and reinstalled only basic programmes and now the total memory usage has dropped to 95% at startup but the situation deteriorates as I load up word processing. My computer has an AMD-K7 550MHz OEM processor with a total of 192MB of extended memory (that's 3x64MB memory chips) When I type "mem" in Dos Mode, something strange is afoot because extended (XMS) is quoted as "total 65,472" and "used ?" and "free 129,764" I have checked that the memory chips are all SDRam and that they are correctly located and I have tried each chip by itself to check that the ram is working. I have checked that the bios setting is for non 0S2 operating system, the total memory insstalled shows up on initial boot up at the top left hand side of the screen, I have reformatted my hard drive and installed only MS software to ensure that no viruses exist and not being exactly computer numerate, I am now completely at a loss to know what to do now!
Joined: Dec 1998
Posts: 3,038
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From: .
The 65,472 is the amount of memory allocated for DOS. This has been done since the inception of DOS and is standard (you can change the amount of memory allocated to DOS, but wouldn't recommend it). Your 65xxx + 129xxx equals the total amount of physical memory you have installed, in this case 192 mb. So in actual fact this is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about, sounds like the supplier is from post DOS era and knows not what he is talking about.
Looks like you wasted a lot of time and effort reformatting, when it really wasn't required.
Hope this helps.
Looks like you wasted a lot of time and effort reformatting, when it really wasn't required.
Hope this helps.
