Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: re 640K limit
Message-ID: <2012@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 15 Jan 90 15:46:05 GMT
References: <4668.25aed7f2@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 19

In article <4668.25aed7f2@uwovax.uwo.ca> 23031_676@uwovax.uwo.ca writes:
| The technical report is fine for hackers, but please try to answer this more
| elementary question:  Like many others, I have purchased a 1 mb system (NEC 
| 286), yet it is not clear that the extra 360 can be used for anything.

  The answer is, on *most* systems the extra 384k shopws up as extended
memory above 1MB. This can be used as RAMdisk. On some systems the BIOS
takes part of it to keep copies of the BIOS, etc, in fast memory.

  I suggest you look at your screen when booting and see how much memory
is reported by POST. That's what you have. There are also some programs
around which will allow using the extended memory for print spooling.

  Unless you do some modestly tricky things you can't use the memory
from 640k-1MB for regular systems memory, and most 286 systems don't map
the extra memory there, anyway.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me