[comp.windows.ms] Windows and Amstrad 1640's

ba124@cs.city.ac.uk (K.A.Streater) (03/11/90)

I recently got Windows 2.01 for my Amstrad 1640 PC (which has an EGA mono
screen, Genius G6+ mouse and MC2400 modem).  I quite happily followed the
setup program expecting great things to happen.  When I typed
WIN to get it started everything seemed to be going well.  The MICROSOFT
banner came up, and the hard disk started to go, and then nothing....
The machine completely hung, and needed a complete power down to get
started again.  I tried reinstalling the program several times, with
no further success.  All other packages have worked perfectly up to now.

Can anyone help? I would hate to think I would have to miss out on
the joys of MS-WINDOWS completely.

-- 
K.A.Streater,	   BITNET: ba124%uk.ac.city.cs@uk.ac JANET: ba124@uk.ac.city.cs 
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pwarburt@ibmpcug.co.uk (P Warburton) (03/21/90)

In article <1990Mar10.203103.6739@cs.city.ac.uk> ba124@cs.city.ac.uk (K.A.Streater) writes:
> 
> I recently got Windows 2.01 for my Amstrad 1640 PC (which has an EGA mono
> screen, Genius G6+ mouse and MC2400 modem).  I quite happily followed the
> setup program expecting great things to happen.  When I typed
> WIN to get it started everything seemed to be going well.  The MICROSOFT
> banner came up, and the hard disk started to go, and then nothing....
> The machine completely hung, and needed a complete power down to get
> started again.  I tried reinstalling the program several times, with
> no further success.  All other packages have worked perfectly up to now.
> 
> Can anyone help? I would hate to think I would have to miss out on
> the joys of MS-WINDOWS completely.
 
This happened to me on a Tandon PAC 286 computer with 2Mbyte extended memory.
I wanted to use the extended memory as expanded memory so that Windows
could take advantage of it and so installed the Tandon EMS driver in
CONFIG.SYS. Windows froze after displaying the logo, just like yours did.

On further investigation, it was found that all was well up to the point
where Windows makes its first EMS (Expanded Memory System) calls.
I tried other EMS drivers but in each case Windows froze. In the end
we gave up and settled for running Windows in 640k.

I have since read that some EMS drivers are incompatible with Windows,
so presumably that was the problem in our case.

Does your Amstrad 1640 have extended memory and an EMS driver? If so,
try removing it and see what happens. And if anyone can suggest how to
persuade Windows to use extra memory on a Tandon PAC 286, I'd be grateful.

Peter Warburton
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