Free Memory

[onegojoe]

I am trying to install Win95 on an old system that now has Win3.1 and when I try to run setup I get following message:
Not enough memory you need 2816K of free memory. I ran mem
check and I have 3461K free memory. What gives? Any suggestion how to get past this?

[Igor M]

Did you run setup from Win3.1? If so try to exit Win3.1 and run setup from DOS. Also check you Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files and remove all unnecessary drivers and programs from these files.

Besides Win95 need at least 4 MB of installed memory to run. But with such amount of memory it works SO SLOWLY it actually not worth trying.

[AlaricD]

Originally posted by onegojoe
I ran mem check and I have 3461K free memory. What gives? Any suggestion how to get past this?

Sounds like the "Not enough free Extended/XMS memory to run setup. Setup needs approximately 2816000 bytes of free Extended/XMS memory" message. Common, and easy to resolve.


Did you run the DOS external command mem, or did you run some program called memcheck?

Also, does that 3461K of free memory that you say you have include conventional memory? Conventional memory is the first 640K of installed memory in a system. The UMB is the remaining 384K in the first installed megabyte. Therefore, if you have 4MB of RAM installed, you can only have 3072KB of extended memory. So, you either have at least 5MB of RAM installed, or you have added the conventional memory to your count of free memory. I'm thinking the latter is correct, else you would have the free XMS required by Windows setup.

I imagine, then, that you have 4MB in the system, and are loading something that is taking XMS -- perhaps a RAM drive or SMARTDRV.EXE. What is in your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT?

You might also have video and BIOS shadowing turned on, on some systems enabling such shadowing can take as much as 384K from extended memory.

(You can bypass the test for minimum system requirements by running setup /nm to install Windows, but once it's installed it may just start failing whenever you try to boot to it.)