W98v2 - CAnnot "Shell out" to DOS from Desk-top

[rafferty5268]

A PC with 512Mb RAM gives a &quot;not enough memory&quot; message when attempting to &quot;shell out to DOS&quot; <Command.com&quot; icon> from the desktop. All memory settings&quot; in the &quot;properties&quot; of this icon are set to &quot;auto&quot;. Another PC with the identical desktop configuration and load-up parameters NEVER gives this problem. Does anyone who reads this please have an explanation for this very irritating problem and have a fix for it. Since I do a lot of my work from the command line <C:\>, this one is important to me.

The machine also runs W2K on another partition and never get any &quot;shell out&quot; problem when W2K is chosen as the initial boot.

Thank you

 

[Jontmke]

Are you saying that opening a DOS prompt gives you this error?
Or restating in &quot;DOS mode&quot;?
If it is prompt then it is the DOS memory it is talking about.
Look in the autoexec.bat and config.sys for lines loading programs into memory.
In WIN98 most of these are not needed and actually hinder the performance. They are ususally leftovers from an upgrade from WIN95 or WIN3.1. You can take out almost all of them.
If you want you can copy them into a post here and I can help you clean them up.


Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[rafferty5268]

No, not starting in &quot;MS-DOS Mode&quot;.
Shelling out from the desktop by clcking on an Ms-Dos icon (which is actually COMMAND.COM in the root directory gives a message of &quot;memory too low&quot; to be able to do it. That's crazy because there are no windows or applications open when I try to get a C:\ prompt outside the desktop.
Memory is 512 Mb which must be ample and another machine with the same configuration gives me a dos prompt unfailingly whenever I click on the MS-Dos prompt on the desktop. Neither autoexec.bat nor config.sys have any extraneous lines in them which they don't need so I'm stumed. Any further ideas please?

 

[BeenThereDoneThat]

rafferty5268:

Win 98 has a problem with large amounts of ram. The fix is easy, you just change a couple lines in the system.ini file. Here's a Microsoft article about it. Could this be what the problem is?

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q253/9/12.asp

 

[Jontmke]

The config.sys really does not need anything in it, unless you still run old DOS type programs which need lines like files=20 or buffers=10.
But, no memory management stuff should be there. No HIMEM or EMM386, stuff like that.
I was going to suggest running the command MEM but you need a DOS prompt to that. DOH!

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[deltarho]

What happens when you execute command.com from Start>Run?

 

[wolluf]

And can you boot to a dos prompt (ie, press F8 or Ctrl key at boot and select that oprion from menu)? Just to see if its the dos environment that's the problem - or your machine.

 

[rafferty5268]

Hi

Many thanks.

Going to MsConfig > Advanced and unticking a couple of things and limiting RAM to 492 (was set on 511) and hey presto the problem is solved. Can now shell out happily and run MSDOS programme icons normally. Lots of messing about with config.sys and autoexec.bat had done nothing

Thanks again for the signpost!