florianb@tekred.CNA.TEK.COM (Florian Bell) (07/27/89)
Stefan Lindmark <d88-sli@nada.kth.se> requests: >In article <4353@tekred.CNA.TEK.COM> you write: >>Thanks to all who responed to my inquiry. I believe I now have the >>information needed to circumvent the problem. > >It would be better to include the best answers you recieved in a short >summary, making it public to everyone on the net. Sure. Nearly everyone who responded told me that EXCEL needs to load certain portions of itself into the first 1MByte of memory. So on a machine like a Mac II with 5 MBytes, if EXCEL can't obtain enough memory in the first 1 MB, it will respond with the "fragmented memory" message. A solution is to start up EXCEL first and the other applications afterward. Of course, this doesn't help with using WriteNow simultaneously with EXCEL and another application, since WriteNow also has a similar problem. A second solution is to upgrade to the newest version of EXCEL (I think it's 2.0), which is able to recognize expanded memory, and also upgrade to the newest version of WriteNow. Someone else pointed out that MicroSoft purchased PowerPoint from someone else, so it apparently doesn't have the problem. It is also possible to have REAL fragmented memory which can result when a few small applications have been started and stopped. The memory is then discontiguous (what a word!), even though the sum of all blocks exceeds the amount necessary for the desired application to start. The solution in this case is to stop all applications and restart the one(s) desired. Florian.