looking at the memory in XP

[annie]

here i am joking away about the memory the trash80 had and i realize that i don't have a clue how XP handles memory and i don't know how to find out.

how much memory does XP take? all the help tells me is to look at the task manager, which tells me what programs i have loaded but not what it loads itself, not where it is loaded, my goodness i don't even know if XP uses blocks. there is no DOS here. what is the equivalent to the MEM /C command in DOS in XP?

now i am really curious. i remember endless arguments about high dos and low dos and extended memory, what order to open programs so that they went into the correctly sized blocks. has that all gone away?

[Matt A]

You can still drop to DOS if you want to.

Go to:

Start

Programs

Accessories

Command prompt

There's DOS.

Type EXIT to get back out of it when you're done. If you already know this, sorry.

[annie]

my goodness look at that DOS. no, i surely didn't know that it was still there. and even if i did it is always helpful to know how to get out of stuff, easy to forget. is it really there or is this a simulation?

i saw that command prompt and wondered what it was but thought that it was the windows command prompt, which i haven't messed around with yet.

should have known that dos was there because i still run a little dos database program, 20 years old i think. can anything be safer from hackers?

this is interesting. ran MEM /C and it is giving me what is in upper memory. which means of course that i HAVE upper memory. mammoth sizes compared to DOS 3.3. interesting that it is giving me the largest available upper memory block as 81 K and then oh i see there really are two free memory blocks,

one 944 bytes and one 83584 bytes. what do i have loaded in memory, hum.

ok everythng closed except this notepad and the command prompt and whatever config.sys loaded or whatever does that. nothing changed so that was not in high memory. it isn't telling me where notepad is.

oh this is interesting. the memory available to dos is about half of total contiguous extended memory, whatever that is, about 2/3 of XMS memory.

what a wonderful new toy. thank you matt.

[Matt A]

This isn't a simulation, it's the real thing. DOS.

There's a way to skip loading Windows altogether at startup and just start with a clean DOS. I can't remember offhand right now which F-key does it, but next start-up I'll check it out for you. It'll bring back some memories of days of yore with nothing else loaded on the machine, back when we actually had to write our OWN batch files!!!:eek:

That little database program wouldn't happen to be File Express now would it?;)

[annie]

This isn't a simulation, it's the real thing. DOS.

which means that i better be real careful. the most important thing i ever learned about DOS was that before you use a wild card in any command always do a DIR command with it first. do i need to tell you how i learned that i ought to do that?

i used to have an assembler simulation, something i always wanted to learn.


There's a way to skip loading Windows altogether at startup and just start with a clean DOS. I can't remember offhand right now which F-key does it, but next start-up I'll check it out for you. It'll bring back some memories of days of yore with nothing else loaded on the machine, back when we actually had to write our OWN batch files!!!:eek:

yeah, something you F when it is first starting up. it shows on my startup menu but i didn't believe it was real.

AUTOEXE.BAT and CONFIG.SYS

i loved batch files. i had a book by somebody richardson that took it to the limits. i actually wrote a windows simulation in DOS 6.2 using batch files. remember the old menu program DA5? i wrote a program to do automatic backups for my librarians that looked and acted just like it. they were used to it. it had error trapping.


That little database program wouldn't happen to be File Express now would it?;)

no, something only for libraries called InMagic. extremely fast, relational, and had in 1983 or 84? fields with unlimited size. revolutionary. green screen, DOS 3.3, and 5 1/4 floppies. even borland had a 255 character limit on its fields then.

i have heard that there is no one person at microsoft who knows everything that windows does.

[annie]

and a cute thing i just noticed while updating virus stuff. when you update and install the updates for spybot a DOS window pops up for a second. i of course had nothing else open, including IE. my IE has a google toolbar (which i love) which blocks popups. wonder what it does to DOS popups. wonder what it does to spybot installations.

[Matt A]

Be real careful with those *.* commands, that's for sure.:D (There's quite a few locked files in XP that you can't delete without going into the registry first and unlocking them.) No, you DON'T need to tell me!!!! :rolleyes: I've had to rebuild more than one directory myself.

Autoexec.bat
Config.sys
Command.com

The oldies but goodies.
If you didn't write it yourself, it wasn't there.
When we were the Masters and the machines were the Slaves.
Well, I still am the Master. My machines do what I tell them to do, not the other way around. Nothing automatic. When it's time for them to do something, I let THEM know.

I still use DOS based File Express as a database program. I got it in 1989, the year it was written. It's just so small and simple to use I never got around to upgrading. It came off of a dial-in bulletin-board, of all things. 18 years later it still serves it's purpose and like you say, definately hacker-proof!:p

How many people do you think could survive if the world had to go back to DOS, Annie?? ;) I know of at least 2................


Edited to add:
I know of at least 3.............
My wife was better at DOS than I was.