Does your Windows 95 detect your CD-ROM without the need for MSCDEX to be loaded? If it does, then you should be better off as the CD-ROM access will be handled by Windows 95 and will not impede on conventional memory. If it doesn't, contact your CD manufacturer to get a Windows 95-compatible driver.
I'd say you will have problems finding much more conventional memory than you already have. Your machine is finding upper memory quite happily when you restart in DOS mode, which means that you have correctly loaded himem.sys and emm386.exe in your config.sys. Be sure that you are using a devicehigh statement for your CD driver in config.sys, and that you are using LH (loadhigh) for your MSCDEX statement in the autoexec.bat.
From the command prompt use:
c:> MEM /c/p
to verify that your drivers are being loaded into upper memory.
It will give you information on which drivers are in conventional memory, and which drivers are being loaded high.
On my Windows 95 box, the system uses 55K of conventional memory and 30K of upper memory. If you add 4K for Himem, 4K for Emm386 and 4K for Win, you get a total of 67K used already in conventional memory, leaving 573K (or 586,000 bytes) free for your DOS software. It will be hard to squeeze out more conventional RAM than this, even with the CD drivers loaded high.
When your Windows 95 system boots (when the cursor is at the top left of the screen) you can tap the F8 key. This will bring up the Windows 95 startup menu. You can select the menu option Step-by-step with confirmation which will ask you which drivers you wish to load. You may be able to squeeze out a few more kilobytes by not loading some of the default drivers such as Ifshelp and the Windows 95 Doublespace driver.
The other option is creating a boot disk using an earlier version of DOS, which would use less system memory.
- Ian Yates