paravia@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark David Kakatsch) (02/21/90)
Hello. I just bought a Gateway 2000 20Mhz 386 system...It comes standard w/ 4 Megs, 65MB HD, VGA, etc...Quite a nice machine. However, I've been thinking of buying windows 386 for it, and I've got a couple of questions. My memory is configured as extended memory, and drivers came w/ the system that configure it as expanded. Now, how will Windows use this memory? Would it need extended, or expanded? Would I be able to make use of the full 4 Megs, so that I could have, say like 8 500K applications running at once? What about the Windows/286? How does that use memory? I think it would be best to reply by E-mail...Thanks much... Mark -- | Albert Einstein got his name after he got| Mark D. Kakatsch | | smashed from drinking only one stein of | paravia@csd4.csd.uwm.edu | | beer. Hence; Albert EinStein. | ...uwmcsd1!uwmcsd4!paravia |
dsampson@x102a.harris-atd.com (sampson david 58163) (02/22/90)
In article <2470@uwm.edu> paravia@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark David Kakatsch) writes: #Hello. I just bought a Gateway 2000 20Mhz 386 system... It comes #standard w/ 4 Megs, 65MB HD, VGA, etc...Quite a nice machine. #However, I've been thinking of buying windows 386 for it, and I've got #a couple of questions. My memory is configured as extended memory, and #drivers came w/ the system that configure it as expanded. Now, how #will Windows use this memory? Would it need extended, or expanded? #Would I be able to make use of the full 4 Megs, so that I could have, #say like 8 500K applications running at once? What about the #Windows/286? How does that use memory? Timely posting since I just ordered one of the beasts too and was reading up on the subject of Windows 386 last night. PC Mag has several articles on Windows 386. They said that Windows 386 has its own internal drivers for EMS 4.0 support so don't use any that your PC manufacturer ships with the machine (I'm just telling you what they said, not what I think you ought to do). When you start an application through Windows 386 it sets up a virtual 8088 machine with 640K of RAM allocated to the application (open window). So with 4 Megs, you can have approximately 6 virtual machines going. I say approximately because Windows 386 does use some memory to create a block of stuff that each application needs. The amount of memory used for the block depends on what kind of things you are running. If you have less than 6 applications, then if one of them uses EMS, it will grab whatever memory is left for EMS (how it does this depends on the way the application software is written. Some programs are EMS hogs and grab all available memory, while others just grab a few blocks at a time.) Windows 386 does use some of the memory to set up an area that has common things that are used by all applications. PC Mag describes how windows 386 does the memory management. One slick thing that Windows does is it creates virtual display devices so full screen applications think they are writing to the CRT through BIOS or directly to the video memory even though they really aren't. Windows 386 remaps the virtual display to the physical display. That's why you can run Lotus 123 as a window in Windows 386, but not in Windows 286 (in Windows 286 windows "removes" itself from memory and loads 123. 123 is now a "Full Screen Application". When you exit 123, it is unloaded from memory and Windows 286 reloads itself). Disk Cashe software supplied by the vendor should be removed, according to the article. They say that SmartDrive (supplied with Windows 386) has a "smoother" integration for cashe operations. Now here's where I get confused..... PC Mag says that SmartDrive uses EXTENDED memory for the cashe. I ordered the 160 Meg disk with ESDI controller and 32K cashe. I believe that the Gateway cashe is hardware based. So whether this is a problem or not remains to be seen. I do wonder if the Gateway drivers let you partition the 4 Megs of memory so that say 1 Meg remains as extended and Windows 386 use whatever's left for EMS. I'll find out in about 1 1/2 weeks. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David Sampson Harris Corporation dsampson@x102a.ess.harris.com Gov't Aerospace Systems Divison uunet!x102a!dsampson Melbourne, Florida -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
knotts@hpl-opus.HP.COM (Tom Knotts) (02/23/90)
>here's where I get confused..... PC Mag says that SmartDrive uses >EXTENDED memory for the cashe. I ordered the 160 Meg disk with ESDI >controller and 32K cashe. I believe that the Gateway cashe is >hardware based. So whether this is a problem or not remains to be >seen. I do wonder if the Gateway drivers let you partition the 4 Megs >of memory so that say 1 Meg remains as extended and Windows 386 use >whatever's left for EMS. This brings up a question which I have. What is the difference between extended and expanded memory? I have 3meg+ of extended, and have decided to configure it all as expanded, because I don't know of any application which uses extended. What is the difference, anyway? tom
kens@hplsla.HP.COM (Ken Snyder) (02/23/90)
> Disk Cashe software supplied by the vendor should be removed, > according to the article. They say that SmartDrive (supplied with > Windows 386) has a "smoother" integration for cashe operations. Now I guess they didn't lie since they said "smoother" and not "faster." I've used both superpckwik and pc-cache and had great performance increases in disc accesses. Installing SmartDrive didn't improve the disc access enough to be noticed. Anybody out there know how to make SmartDrive perform like a real disc caching program? > here's where I get confused..... PC Mag says that SmartDrive uses > EXTENDED memory for the cashe. I ordered the 160 Meg disk with ESDI > controller and 32K cashe. I believe that the Gateway cashe is > hardware based. So whether this is a problem or not remains to be The cache for the disc is on the Ultrastore disc controller itself. It is totally invisible to DOS except for providing faster accesses. > seen. I do wonder if the Gateway drivers let you partition the 4 Megs > of memory so that say 1 Meg remains as extended and Windows 386 use > whatever's left for EMS. > Yes. Every EMS memory manager I've seen allows you to specify an amount of memory to be left as extended. BTW, in your memory calculations, remember to exclude the 384k between 640k and 1M. This memory is used exclusively for rom shadowing (whether you shadow or not), video mapping and I/O space for some cards. Some memory managers can "reclaim" some of the fragments left over for special applications (himem tsr's) but it can't be used as expanded memory. I'm not sure if this is true of motherboards other than the Micronics board used in the Gateway or not. Gateway owner, Ken