Memory stuff...
All memory, as measured by System Monitor is the physical RAM used by Windows. I think video memory, cache, device buffers, and such stuff are usually excluded from this. Today's systems usually have many megabytes.
DOS memory...
DOS only 'sees' the first meg of memory. Of this meg, DOS allocates some to itself, video, device drivers, some terminate-and-stay-resident programs, internal buffers, and internal stacks. What's left over is available for programs. In a 'perfectly efficient' system, you'd see 640k available for programs. In a typical system, you'd see about 600k. Free DOS memory is a percentage of actually free memory of potentially available free memory. You could expect to see well over 90% free.
If you had many, many, windows open simultaneously, you'd be chewing through much of your system's memory. You could expect to see 50% or less available if you're using 64meg of a 128meg system. If, when you see this, you open a DOS window, you'd notice another meg disappear as it's allocated to DOS. Looking inside this window, the free DOS memory measurement would tell you how much of the memory allocated to this DOS window is currently free. If you did nothing in this DOS window except open it and check its resources, you'd expect to see over 90% of memory free. Here's a case where your Window's memory would appear diminished, but DOS memory would appear mostly free.
Sorta like looking at a nearly full bottle in a case of empties.
Hope this helps, PW. |
