Linda Proulx wrote in a message to Peter Knapper:

 LP> Greetings and Salutations,

 LP>      -=> Peter Knapper wrote to Linda Proulx <=-

 PK> So if you ever load ANY sort of driver, then it WILL always take up
 PK> memory, except it wont matter in the slightest to the rest of the
 PK> machine because it is all VIRTUAL memory!

 LP> I guess what I want to do is maximise the 32 Mb of memory I
 LP> have. 

OS/2 will do that for you. No muss, no fuss.

 LP>  I use to run DV & I would load some program specific
 LP> drivers for that session if they weren't needed in the
 LP> general boot up.  That way I could run more DV windows.  

I used to run DV also.  No comparison in method of operation.  DV was just
DOS, with some fake multitasking schemes going on.  OS/2 will allocate memory
pretty much as needed, and swap applications in and out of memory as needed. 
I remember once when I had only 8 meg on this machine, I came home from work,
used my computer for about a half hour or more, and when I brought up my task
window, there must have been 25 or 30 apps all opened.  My wife knew how to
open stuff, but not close stuff.  You could not notice any change in behavior.

OS/2 is really good about allocating memory.  OS/2 will load the app in
memory, and if not enough memory is left, it will swap an app to disk to make
room for it, on a oldest  used app basis.  This is generally unnoticable
unless you have some real pig GUI apps that must be swapped out.  Once the app 
is loaded in memory though, it will run just like it would if no swapping ever 
took place.

As for DOS sessions and DOS drivers, you load them individually for each app
when OS/2 carves out a memory location for that app.  When you close the app,
the app and its drivers are gone.  For DOS sessions, each session is like it's 
own seperate PC, and, you can have different drivers loaded in each session. 
One DOS session might have ANSI.SYS running, one might not.  One might have a
DOS FOSSIL running another might not.  Also, DOS session can all have
different autoexec.bat files.  When I start my BBS, OS/2 runs AE_BBS.BAT as
its "autoexec.bat". Normal DOS sessions use AE_REG.BAT.  I also have
AE_GAMES.BAT and so on.  These startup files are defined in the DOS_SESSION
settings, including what SYS drivers you want used in the session, as well as
a BUNCH of other settings.

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

 LP> I trust this makes sense?

It makes sense from a DOS/DV perspective (DOS THINK) but not much from an OS/2 
perspective.

These concepts are rather important to understand in OS/2.  Once you get the
concept, things get much clearer.  Someone told you you can run *.BAT files
from an OS/2 session.  This is not quite accurate.  OS/2 recognizes that a BAT 
file is DOS session application, and it will start up a DOS session using the
DEFAULT values for a DOS session and run the BAT file.  This means that the
DOS environment may not be what you expect, for example a PATH may not be set
to what you want (by default, OS/2 uses the AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the boot root 
directory), so if the bat file doesn't point a DOS app with full path, you
might get a file not found error.  

Anyway, 32MB of ram is plenty for OS/2.  I ran in 8 for years, no complaints,
and now only have 20, and that is also plenty.  Horrible GUI pig apps like
Netscape, WINDOWS 3.x and so on can never have enough memory or CPU speed, or
Disk speed, or video memory, so unless you have a Cray super computer, I guess 
you will always need more muscle.  Not sure a Cray would help with some of
this garbage that is out today.

      Jack 
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