Re: Oracle Installer: Windows 3.1 - Not enough memory

Steve Cosner wrote in message <882383894.563740677_at_dejanews.com>...
>We have a Windows 3.1 pc where we are trying to reinstall Oracle Reports.
> But the installer won't load from the CD. It reports some message about
>not enough memory.
>
>However, the pc has 32Meg available, and nothing else is running. There
>are hundreds of Megabyes available on the hard drive as well.

Thanks to the great design of Win3.1 and Win95, you can 128MB RAM and still run out of memory (even when only using 32bit apps in Win95). Windows uses conventional DOS memory. Every program (even 32bit Win95 programs) needs a 16bit stub in conventional memory. Some PC configurations requires TSRs and devide drivers to be loaded in DOS before Windows loads - this of course can reduce the amount of convetional memory required by Windows to glue everything together.

Also, there run a lot of hidden applications in Windows - things like network dde, ole, battery power checking/power saving stuff, protocol software etc. So even though it may look that there's no application active except Program Manager, there may be a lot of resource hungry stuff in the background.

Closing applications in Window also does not always guarantee that all the memory will be released. The great memory manager of Windows do not keep track of which memory blocks belongs to which application - so when an application bombs or "forgets" to release memory, that memory is not released by Windows as it does not clean up after an application.

My suggestion is to look at what has changed in PC's config since you ran Oracle Installer the last time. Remove unecessary drivers and TSR's from config.sys and autoexec.bat (e.g. why waste memory loading a 16bit DOS mouse driver when you can use the windows virtual mouse driver instead). Make sure that you use the high memory area to load DOS driver (e.g. DEVICEHIGH and LOADHIGH). Do a clean boot of the system and run Oracle Installer first before any other application. And pray that it works... :-)

regards,
Billy Received on Thu Dec 18 1997 - 00:00:00 CET