Did my first fdisk/reformat/reload (is there an abbreviation for that?) of this Dell XPS450, learned a few things (filled a notebook), and everything is working as good, mostly better than before. However I notice that in Device mgr/system devices I now have only 4 sets of motherboard resources where previously I had 5. The I/O port usage summary matches pre-reload. How are motherboard resources assigned and is this something I should worry about?

Before bootstrap, MoBo resources are assigned by the BIOS including IDE devices, PCI slots, Legacy Slots, Memory, on-board cache, and any on-board devices (sound, I/O ports, Lan Ports, IRQ's, DMA and USB). Then, upon bootstrap, resources may be re-assigned by the OS. IRQ-Steering, Virtual Comm Ports, Video, etc.). Also, memory management is handled by the OS in one of two ways .. MS-DOS support .. CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and by the OS othewise. If you require EMS support for MS-DOS apps (and your MoBo /OS will support it, then it must be handled in CONFIG.SYS, CONFIG.DOS, CONFIG.NT and AUTOEXEC.BAT, AUTOEXEC.DOS). Probably more info than you wanted. If you Google around some, you'll find a lot more. Don

Thank you! The 15 pages (from @1300 hits)I had read from my google search had just left me spinning. In one paragraph you clearly summed up what I wanted to know! Thanks again!