Hi Bob,

BL> I bought 16Mb for $179 (installed) on Monday, and mine was
BL> parity RAM too, done the same way as yours with 4 chips on the
BL> back of the board. I was a bit nervous mixing it with my 8Mb of
BL> non-parity, but the nice Chinese lady gave me a lecture in a
BL> language I assumed was English and it seems to work anyway.

BV> It worked because your M/b doesn't use the parity bits even if
BV> they are there.

BL> The M/b can do parity if I turn it on, but that's not what I meant.

R-U-Sure ? 

BL> I was worried that the two sets of totally different RAM might conflict.
BL> So far, so good.

Not if Parity has been disabled. Still, you know that now.

BV> You got screwed again with something you don't need :)
BL>  It was the *cheapest* RAM going, so I got 12.5% more than I paid
BL> for. I figure I may have paid 20% more than I should have done if my
BL> estimate of $150 for 16Mb RAM is right. I *really* got screwed when I
BL> paid $450 a year ago for the 8Mb already in there...3-times the real
BL> price.

True.

BV> It sure was "cheap" though. Perhaps the "parity"
chips are fake 
BL> ROFL!!
BL> In a general sense, I never did see any point in parity. If a system
BL> is so unreliable it needs 12.5% redundancy then 12.5% is not enough!
BL> The minimum workable redundancy is 100% - or you may as well not
BL> bother.

True. The only reason for the parity bit was that the PC was designed when
RAM was the highest cost and suffered from the highest failure rate.
The parity was simply a way for IBM to "look" like a serious PC.

BL> BTW, I stripped out the drivers like you said but nothing much
BL> happened. I had 615K before and 616K after.

Yep. But, you've got more UMB's available so that you can now load
sound-card drivers there or let windoze use it. I knew that you
wouldn't get any more "system" RAM, but you still got rid of a lot
of trash that was either a.) doing nothing b.) waiting to bite you
c.) stopping you from loading additional drivers in the future.

BL> What does IFSHLP.SYS do?

Windows actually has an "installable" file system. This has been
there since version 1.0. Well, it has always been able to support an
installable file system but Microsoft thought that they had better
keep it secret (Don't ask...I don't know why...Paranoid perhaps ?)
Anyway, They use it in Win3.11 to support Networking and I think it
also helps with the 32-bit stuff. I've never bothered to poke around
in it to tell you the truth. I saw it and though, "Aha...They've
fucked up and need a DOS driver to enable the Installable File System
stuff that they've been keeping secret for so long. Typical of M$.
Take a good idea and fuck it up." So, I've never bothered with it.

BL> It's located in the /windows directory as part of Win311 but I don't
BL> know what installed it.

The Windows installation program put it into your config.sys

I've just had a look and the "official" line is...The IFSHLP.SYS
file is used to provide real-mode support for the IFS manager that
is responsible for passing data to the appropriate device, wether
the device is installed locally or elsewhere on the network.

Does that clear it up ? ... I thought so :)

Cheers, Brenton
@EOT:

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