TITLE: Advanced Gravis Tech Note #11 AREA: MEMORY MANAGERS DATE: January 22, 1993 KEY WORDS: MEMORY MANAGERS SLOW DOWN SUBJECT: Do not use third pary memory managers where possible Although many of these memory managers are highly rated and work quite well in most cases, they do steal precious time. A recent PC Magazine test of memory managers confirms this. As with EMM386.EXE, memory managers require some knowledge to configure for maximum performance. Many memory managers sacrifice performance for convenience. In other words they do some wonderfull things, like maximize memory allocation automatically, but they take time to do this. Below is a typical CONFIG.SYS for a 4 meg system using MS DOS managers. FILES=25 BUFFERS=25 DOS=HIGH,UMB DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE 1024 FRAME=E000 RAM The \DOS\directory path should be replaced with \WINDOWS\ if windows is installed. The Windows versions are better in most cases. This configuration will give MOST 386 or better systems about 634k of available main memory, 95k of upper memory for SBOS, mouse drivers etc., 1 meg of expanded memory and about 2 megs of extended memory. As minimal as it looks, this configuration will satisfy the needs of most games. Some games want no EMS at all. Simply delete the last line in the above example. A separate bootable floppy disk can be created just for games. Read the section on optimizing the system in the DOS reference manual.