Re: Shortcut memory settings for Xy; components

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

In a recent posting, Robert recommended "Expanded EMS mem 5120." Is that
all that XyW can handle? or all that DOS could supply when XyW was
written? Or all that was commonly found in those days? (Odd factoid: I
was recently checking out an upgraded 486 running MS DOS 6.x: when it
booted, the memory count ran to 32 Mb, but DOS's MEM command never showed
more than 16 Mb. Then I dug out a Novel DOS 7 boot disk and booted with
that: Novel's MEM reported 32 Mb, 16 of it under DPS [DOS Protected-mode
services]. Looks as if MicroSquish's DOS couldn't recognize more than 16
Mb.) Anyway, with 128 Mb of RAM (plus 4 Mb of VGA RAM that the bios
counts in the total, though it's on a separate card), the properties box
of a DOS app Pif offers up to 16,384 Mb EMS RAM on my machine. I have set
XyWrite to use 14,336, and will see what happens. Of course, I never try
to multitask DOS apps, and rarely Windows ones bigger than Notepad or
Paint. Possibly if one were running Xy and some other DOS app one would
get into serious problems will all EMS allocated to XY.
	About RAM and hard drives: Megahaus and DirtCheap Drives have been
around for years (ads in Computer Shopper and PC World). Personally, I
swear by Western Digital drives ever since they not merely honored a
warranty when it was the dying MoBo that killed the drive, but sent me a
replacement that was twice as big, because they didn't make that size
drive any more. And reset the warranty to day 1. I have gotten RAM with
good results from Memory Man (in New Orleans; 800-634-2298;
www.memman.com) and from a local (NJ) store, Coast to Coast memory, in
East Brunswick (800-463-4679/4me-mory; I hate that kind of phone number);
some of their sticks are recycled, but they offer a lifetime warranty,
and if your board is a year or two old, you may need second-hand RAM.
	Harry: the choice of named fonts for the PIF isn't available under Win
9x, only NT and 2K and up (I was puzzled by that the first time round
too).
Log/Restore: I usually do it with the out-of-the-box keyboard assignments
of Ctrl L and Ctrl R; will see if there are FNs (the keyboard file calls
the menu). Meanwhile, do a DIR and look for files with the extension MAX,
DEL, and RES. Those are the ones that log creates and restore accesses;
check their attributes from the desktop and make sure they haven't gotten
marked Read-only.
Patricia