Hi all, I'm running Win95 on a Pentium 133 with Himem.sys and Emm386.sys and only a CD_rom driver loaded (probably milked conventional memory as much as I could). As far as I know, this isn't a need to optimize Conventional Memory, whenever I type mem I get TOTAL conventional memory as 520K~540K (depending on what frame rate I use for Emm386) as opposed to the standard 640K or 639K and as you can see this leaves me with very little free conventional memory. I think that I have isolated the problem to be that of Memory used for IO at boot up. my system uses around 150K for IO whether I boot from windows or boot clean from disk (type "mem /m io" in dos prompt to see memory usage, post your figures if you wish), and seeing how most of my friends uses only about 20K~40K for IO on their computer I'm pretty sure that it's the memory allocation to IO that's causing the problem. So if anyone out there knows how to reduce this little "memory leak", I anxiously await your answers. thanks everyone for reading this tremendous long msg. p.s. I have no intention of using a mem manager, hopefully I could just alter something in the config and autoexec files.

You probably don't have to worry about that unless you're using some dos programs. I use dos 6.22 memmaker and get up to about 620K. You might try that.

If you're trying to free up conventional memory and you don't have a compressed drive. you can edit your msdos.sys so it doesn't load your compression drivers. also for a normal windows boot you'll want to worry more about upper memory so you'll what to try just loading things so the don't load high. More here Conventional & Upper Memory Help Windows Help TheGorx

Free conventional memory is not necessarily dependent on WHAT you load but HOW you load it. In the Config.sys, the EMM386.exe line should have typed after it a space and then NOEMS. I.E C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.exe NOEMS. The Config.sys should also have after this lines such as ... DOS=HIGH DOS=UMB Devices such as CDROM drivers, DISPLAY.SYS etc should be prefixed with DEVICEHIGH= i.e DEVICEHIGH=C:\WINDOWS\CDROM etc,etc,. The autoexec.bat file also needs to be edited. You need to load the CDROM drivers etc and whatever else into high memory by typing the letters LH and a space before the appropriate lines. i.e. LH C:\Windows\MSCDEX.exe etc. You will now be loading into upper memory all that is possible to load. By not using AUTOEXEC or CONFIG files, my computer gives me 607k free memory and the io usage is 18k. If I use the files, then my free conventional memory is increased to 621k and the io usage is 78K. This is because whilst I am loading up more into DOS at the boot up,I am freeing conventional memory by usage of the two files. In other words, I am putting all I can into upper memory.

I should have added type MEM /C/P to view the conventional and upper memory usage

I greatly appreciate the numerous repsonses my msg has generated. Thanks to all of you that took the time to read and/or post a response. I think I have finally solved the problem; it would seem that DoubleSpace/DriveSpace which is loaded first of all in boot up has been taking up my precious conventional memory. By disabling it in the MSDOS.SYS as suggested, I was finally able to increase "Total Conventional Memory" to the standard 640K with IO usage boarding on 50K (which isn't too bad, one should always be content with progress I suppose ^^), giving me a free base memory of 585K. Thanks once again for the people out there for been so generous with their words and know-how.

forgot to mention this earlier, Terry and to all those out there interested. Personally I get more free memory with the RAM HIGHSCAN switch replacing any frame rate options after the EMM386.exe statement in config. Though you should probably disable it in hardware detection under Windows. Give it a try to see if it works for your specific system, but be sure to backup before hand. Thanks all, and keep up the good work :o)