🚀 go-pugleaf

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.



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David Sampson                                         Harris Corporation
dsampson@x102a.ess.harris.com                   Gov't Aerospace Systems Divison
uunet!x102a!dsampson                                  Melbourne, Florida

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