Don't buy an HP PC and try upgrading it

[Kernel]

that's the stone-age equivilent of the math-co-processor isn't it?

[Bomb Bloke]

First we had a x086 with the amount of ram written in proudly, in big letters, on the front: 640K

 

You could write a batch file full of echo statements and it would take over half a second per line. And you could hear it working, too: made this really cool metalicly weird processing noise whenever it did... Anything.

 

The BBC model B was a cooler machine. It's screen only displayed shades of green, and it had no harddrive. I wrote programs from books I found in the library straight into it. Some of them were so huge that once I'd typed them, the computer couldn't load them back into memory! Ah, those were the days...

 

Next we got a 486DX2. Yes, Ki-tat, I remember the turbo button. Used that machine for nearly a decade, and learnt a whole lot about how to make a machine run efficiently...

[Matri]

What's your record? I managed to free up 615kb conventional RAM on DOS 5.

 

And due to the way programs and games were in those times, some refused to run!

[Bomb Bloke]

Think I got 624K, but it's all too long ago to remember. You might well have beaten me.

 

The trick was to load up the expanded memory drivers, but don't actually enable the expanded memory itself. Not sure why, but this produced a load of free conventional memory, and if you threw all your TSRs in upper memory you could run pretty much whatever you wanted to.

 

The exception to this was Ultima 7, which used it's own memory drivers, and thus you had to fit your sound/mouse drivers in conventional, which U7 also required stacks of. It wouldn't run if you had EMS in memory, so it was a bit tricky getting memory for that one.

 

The other catch to the EMS driver with no EMS memory trick was that if you tried to shutdown Windows 95 it was guarentied to hang on the 'shutting down' screen, and thus your computer would always want to run scandisk on the next boot. Thank heavens for TweakUI.

[Matri]

I used MemMaker, and I left Himem on "AUTO". Worked like a charm.

[Pete]

Fairly sure I managed 624k as well. There was a point where my own startup files were more efficient than running memmaker. Ahhh, those were the days

[Bomb Bloke]

I used memmaker until I worked out how to do things manually.

[Matri]

Of course, nowadays we have absolutely no say in memory management.

[Bomb Bloke]

I find that a good way to free up memory in Windows is to reboot.

 

Speaking of which, Windows 9x systems pretend to use all memory. NT based ones (such as XP) DO use all memory. Thus if your memory is unstable, NT systems are more likely to crash then 9x ones.

[Matri]

Eh.

 

True.

 

So true.