Date:         Sat, 10 Oct 92 09:34:35 EDT
From:         Jerry Walsh <WALSHJ@SJUVM>
Subject:      Quest for the eschatological RAMbyte
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.notabene

The following information may be of interest to those who are trying,
like me, to squeeze more available RAM out of their systems.  It may be
(probably will be) old hat to the gurus among us, but for what it's
worth...  (If you're not interested in following the memory thread that
has been on the list, discard this right now.  It gets verbose.)
   At Michael Shalev's suggestion, I downloaded The Last Byte from a
SIMTEL mirror.  This program has a utility to check the chipset in a
286 machine to see if you can access the UMBs; if you can, I believe,
the program can be installed to do so.  (I can't, of course, which leads
to a new corollary for Murphy's law:  When 2 potential solutions to a
problem present themselves, the straightforward one won't work.  And the
roundabout one may not either...)  Those who want to try this program
can find it in the /msdos/sysutl/ subdirectory.  It consists of 4 ZIP
files beginning with TLB.  The utility to check the chipset is in the
file TLB-T211.ZIP.
   Once I got the bad news from TLB I looked at some of the other
memory programs in the /msdos/sysutl/ subdirectory and found two that I
think will help me:  ADDMEM25.ZIP and VRAM40.ARC.
   UnZIPped, the first produces ADDMEM, a removable TSR that takes ad-
vantage of idle memory on an EGA or VGA card when the screen is in text
mode.  Depending on your configuration, it claims to add 64 or 96 Kbytes
to your RAM (and to use 5 Kbytes for itself).  It warns you NOT to try
to load a graphics program while ADDMEM is resident: the system will
crash.  But since it is easily removable, and NB remains adamantly in
text mode, a couple of lines sandwiching an nb-loading batch file avoid
such eventualities.  I tried it.  I loaded NB from the command line
without ADDMEM; F7 reported 179 Kbytes free.  I quit to DOS, loaded
ADDMEM, and loaded NB again from the command line; F7 reported 269
Kbytes free.  (I have a VGA card with 1M memory.)  The program is
shareware and costs $15US plus $3 s/h.
   The second file, unARCed, yields VRAM.  This program makes extended
memory or disk space available as expanded memory.  It can be loaded as
a permanent TSR (removable only by reboot), or it can be used as a pro-
gram launcher that is removed when the program finishes.  Since I have
no idea whether NB3.1 (NB4 is still vaporware for me) can use expanded
memory, I tried VRAM (with some of its cleverer switches) as a launcher
for the DOS MEM command.  Without VRAM MEM reports 567 Kbytes of con-
ventional memory free on my system; with VRAM, it reports 541 Kbytes of
conventional memory and 131 Kbytes of expanded memory.  I then tried
both ADDMEM and VRAM to load Lotus's AGENDA program.  Results were more
or less as expected.  With neither loaded, the AGENDA memory utility
reported 141 Kbytes of conventional memory available, and no expanded.
With ADDMEM alone, it reported 230 Kbytes of conventional, no expanded.
With VRAM alone, it reported 115 Kbytes of conventional, 64 Kbytes of
expanded (this puzzles me; I think it should have been 128K).  With
both, it reported 204 Kbytes of conventional and 64 of expanded.  VRAM
is also shareware.  The downloadable version is limited:  it is set to
create 128 Kbytes of expanded memory.  The registered version ($49US)
allows the user to determine the amount.
   Now, if any of the gurus on the list (to whom none of this is news,
I suspect) are still reading, do you have any advice, warnings, or
other insights into either of these programs or their ilk?  Some spe-
cific questions that occur to me:  (1) What use is expanded memory for
NB3.x?  How about for the eschatological NB4?  (2) Does anybody have
any advice on how to juggle a Stackered RAMdrive, PC-CACHE, and VRAM
in 1 Mbyte of extended memory?  (3) If I use VRAM in my AUTOEXEC.BAT
in TSR mode to create permanent expanded memory, is it possible to
load any of the device drivers there?  (I doubt it, since they've al-
ready been loaded by CONFIG.SYS, but who am I to set limits to magic?)
                                   Jerry Walsh
                                   WALSHJ@SJUVM.bitnet
                                   WALSHJ@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU.internet
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU