can somone explain to me how memory works in dos and win 3.1x? ive got 512 mb which should be plenty, but when i try and install any 16-bit internet explorer higher than version 3, i get told i need 4mb of memory to continue installation, I HAVE 4 MB!!! why is this message appearing on a system that to dos 6.22 and windows 3.1 must seem like a sports car? and how can i get round it?

You've given an incomplete data. May I know the motherboard? Harddrive capacity? Technical Specifications of your PC? I recall you must adjust the size of your swap file which must be greater thatn 4 MB! Observe! Before you run WFG run the application Mem.exe!- You must have a reading that you are using 64 MB of RAM! - If not then you have not properly installed your 512 MB Memory....DOS only utilizes a maximum of 64 MB ram although you got a hardram that reads above 64 MB.

Change the start-up so you start in MS DOS then run Memmaker, that will optimize base memory usage, then undertake as above.

Not so sure that's indicated - the 'setup requires at least 4Mb' message is covered here I'm not insensitive, I just don't care.

It's a *bug* in IE ..happens if you've got lots of RAM..follow jboy's link (above)..it'll show you how to get past it. i don't remember it offhand or i'd give it here.. P.S. it's not IE that has a problem with lots of RAM, it's only the installer...

As #4, probably a bug in old IE. In those days, more than maybe 32MB was unheard of. So the installer does a system call and looks for a memsize of > 4MB and expects a # maybe as big as 32 or 64. When it gets a # in the 100s, it doesn't know what to do. Problem may br avoided, but not solved, by using MetScape 3x/4x HTH M2

Well. Spelling counts. I meant Netscape 3x 4x. As I think more about it. It's probably getting mem size, which in your case is 512 [200 hex] and putting the low byte into a location for a compare. [and maybe ignoring the high byte] Unfortunately, the low byte is 00, so it exits with a msg must have >4MB. If this is how it works, you could change physical mem size to almost anything BUT a multiple of 256. But that seems a pretty mickey-mouse approach. M2