Summary:
 
If you are running Microsoft Access on a 4 meg machine you can gain
performance improvements by altering the configuration of memory usage
on the machine.
 
More Information:
 
The following steps can be used to enhance the relative performance of
Microsoft Access on computers with 4 megs of ram:
 
1. Don't use any of your RAM for a RAM disk
 
2. Use at the most, 512K for smartdrv or other disk caches
 
3. If your network installation requires memory (>200K) performance
   will be affected.
 
4. Don't run several other "mega" apps. Actually, running even one
   other "mega" app (like a full blown spreadsheet or wordprocessor) can
   significantly degrade performance.  Be aware that alternate desktop
   managers like Norton Desktop for Windows consume enough memory to be
   considered a "mega" app.
 
5. Run Windows in standard mode.
 
6. Set the MaxBufferSize entry in MSACCESS.INI to a value less than
   512.  In low memory cases this will help even though less memory will
   be used for by Microsoft Access for buffering database I/O.  See the
   Microsoft Access README.TXT file for details on setting this value.
 
7. Open databases Exclusive, and Read/Only if possible.
 
8. If you don't want to use the Wizards in Microsoft Access you can disable
   them by removing the line that says WIZARDS.MDA=RO from the [Libraries]
   section of the MSACCESS.INI.  This will free up over 300K of RAM.  You
   will no longer have wizards in Microsoft Access though.
 
9. Keep the number of applets that are running to a minimum.
 
10. If you have a full screen background bitmap on your Windows
   desktop, replace it with a smaller bitmap or no bitmap at all.  For a
   standard VGA this will free about 256K, for a 1024x768 256 color
   display this can free about 3/4 of a megabyte.  Your actual savings
   may vary.
 
11. Keep in mind that CD ROM device drivers, sound board drivers,
   screen savers, midi drivers, multi-media support drivers all take up
   extra memory.  The 4mb recommendation does not take this into account.
   If you need to have this sort of configuration under Windows then 4mb
   is not going to work well for Microsft Access.
 
 
In short the 4mb recommendation was pretty much for a stone stock
386/20, DOS 5, unmodified Windows 3.1, VGA, Mouse, and some sort of
network workstation software.  If this is your configuration you will
get good performance, this has been verified by benchmarks with Microsoft
Access fully installed.  The more sophisticated your configuration is
beyond this the greater your need will be for more memory.