I've had Windows 3.1 roughly eight years, and two years ago, the paintbrush program stopped allowing the use of color, saying that there was not enough memory. I bought a new computer with WIN 95 for the family, and moved the 3.1 to my room for my writing. I erased every game, picture, and text document not essential to the working of 3.1, and I tried to defragment the hard drive, but even DEFRAG won't work. When I type mem /c/p it says that the largest program I can use is 616KB. I know that I have (four) 8MB chips, how do I change the memory allocation, or improve the memory with the resources I currently have in the computer?

Have you tried running memmaker? Do a custom setup and choose "Yes" to every question except for if any programs need EMS (or is it XMS?). Well you only prompted for one of those. Awnser "No" to this question, and yes to the rest.

MEM is DOS utility...It reports accordingly...DOS can only use 640K...Ergo, 616K is pretty good...Memaker might make it better, tho... Don't know why Defrag doesn't work..Did it report memory problem?

Thank you for the speedy responses! I ran the MemMaker program as suggested, and I am pleased that the re-allocation was beneficial to some degree. I still can't run Defrag. The message that I get reads: Insufficient memory Error reading the directory To run DEFRAG, you may need to free more conventional memory. For more information, see the Microsoft Defragmentor section of the README.TXT file. The readme.txt offers a paucity of information, basically re-itterating the message that I just typed. I also tried the command line: defrag c: /skiphigh which (if I understand right) is supposed to cause it to run in the expanded memory rather than the conventional. Anyway, that's the problem in full. Thanks!