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Member Advice Summary
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How it works: Random Access Memory
by vemartin | Mar 08 '00
Random Access Memory (RAM), is probably the most misunderstood bit of hard-ware in a Personal Computer (PC). Most people want more of it in their PCs without having a thorough understanding of its benefits or limitations. They’ve all been told the more...Return to opinion
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Small correction (Reply to this comment)
by Daywalker
I applaud your effort and think you did laudable job.
One small thing I would like to point out.
In regard to your comment:
HIGH MEMORY: also know as Upper Memory, is 640k to 1024 Megabytes, which is 384k of XMS memory.
That is not quite accurate.
Upper memory is from 640 to 1024, and is used for device drivers, as you quite aptly pointed out. Originaly conventional memory (0-640)was known as system memory, and upper memory was known as reserved.
The LIM (Lotus, Intel, Microsoft) specification renamed them, in addition to creating Himem.sys and EMM386.exe.
High memory, or more specifically the High Memory Area (HMA), is the first 64k above 1024. It is created by Himem.sys(loaded by placing "device=c:\dos\himem.sys" or whatever the path to himem.sys is,in the config.sys file), and typically a portion of DOS is loaded there, provided dos=high is used. XMS refers to memory above 1024.
EMM386.EXE, besides creating the page frame and providing access to EMS, can map unused upper memory blocks as conventional memory, provided DOS=UMB is used.
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Sep 30 '00
7:47 pm PDT
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Very comprehensive, but... (Reply to this comment)
by vicwang
While your article was extremely thorough and accurate, I feel many less-technical readers would be misled to think you are talking about memory in general, and not *DOS* memory, which is completely irrelevant for any users of Win95/98/NT/2000 since they have none of the memory limitations of DOS (although you do mention it briefly at the end of the article).
In fact, the only reason the information would be useful to someone using an post-Windows 3.1 operating system is if they are trying to run games in true DOS mode (as opposed to in a DOS window)--a true rarity these days.
For that reason I would suggest making it more clear that you are strictly talking about DOS memory management, not Win95+, since your review title simply implies it is simply about RAM.
Also, speaking of that, you mention that "(for) Windows 95/98/2000... the sky’s the limit". However, the sky is not the limit on many motherboards (especially older ones)--not only because they have maximum RAM limits, but also because you can add lots of RAM, but the motherboard can not actually CACHE all of it. In that case you can actually SLOW your system down if you add too much RAM.
ALSO, there comes a point where more RAM will simply have no effect: if you are not using all your RAM to begin with. I suggest using the System Monitor utility that comes with Windows to first chart your RAM usage, and see how often (and IF) you use all your available RAM.
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Mar 29 '00
10:52 pm PST
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I Forgot What I Was Going To Say About Memory (Reply to this comment)
by Hard_To_Please
Thanks for the lesson- I sometimes have a hard time remembering the difference between RAM and ROM...Mark
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Mar 12 '00
8:47 am PST
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Sky high and climbing (Reply to this comment)
by conradd
I agree with your last statement. No matter how much memory we have, it is never enough.
Thanks for another well written review.
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Mar 08 '00
3:02 pm PST
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