Hi Linda,

 LP> I guess what I want to do is maximise the 32 Mb of memory I have.  I use
 LP> to run DV & I would load some program specific drivers for that session
 LP> if they weren't needed in the general boot up. 

Ahaaa, I ran DV/QEMM for several years before I moved to OS/2 1.3, so now I
see where you are coming from. The DV/QEMM Memory management model has only
very minor parallels to OS/2 as far as the REAL memory in the machine is
concerned, however because OS/2 adds in the Swap file, the overall effect is a 
VASTLY difference in capability. 

With DV/QEMM, each DV "window" (for want of a better term) is fixed in size.
If you have 2MB memory and you want to run 400Kb "windows", then you can only
get a MAXIMUM of 5 of these windows open at any one time. With OS/2, no such
limitation exists, ALL memory is virtual and is PAGED to the swap file. In
fact you dont really need to even THINK about this, it is totally transparent
to the user.

As a quick comparison, I have 2 OS/2 machines here, the BBS and this machine.
The BBS has 13 Tasks, 30 Processes, and 120 Threads running. The machine I am
typing on has 19 Tasks, 43 Processes and 147 threads. The BBS is dedicated to
the task and has all its normal BBS functions running, including LAN services. 
It has 32Mb RAM and has 3.4Mb unused of that RAM. My machine has 128Kb RAM and 
67MB of that memory unused. So neither machine currently needs to use SWAP
space, but as you can see there is certainly plenty of programs running on
each. 

Now 3 weeks ago the BBS machine had a motherboard fail and it ran temporarily
on an old 486DX33 with 16Mb memory. EVERYTHING running now ran then, the only
changes I had to make was to swap out the PCI LAN card and the PCI SCSI
controller with ISA equivalents, because the 486 does not have any PCI slots.
Otherwise, everything still ran exactly as it is now, except on the 486 board
it did a lot more swapping, but I had to change NOTHING in that part of the
configuration. Everything is handled automatically...

So you can see that unlike DV/QEMM, memory is NOT a hard limit with OS/2.

 LP> In order to have more virtual sessions available to me 
 LP> generally I don't want to take away anything from the 
 LP> original OS startup that may lose me 1 or 2 available 
 LP> sessions later that a specific need driver would take 
 LP> away from my total available memory.

The session limit you talk about simply does NOT EXIST under OS/2! 

 LP> I trust this makes sense?

Well your thinking was valid for a DV/QEMM style environment, but none of it
makes any sense for an OS/2  VIRTUAL environment. You will find life MUCH
easier with OS/2, in this respect...

I hope this helps..........pk.


--- Maximus/2 3.01