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- ID:A2 Setup for AST Premium 286
- Quarterdeck Technical Note
- by Stan Young
-
- First, let me say that this technical note does not eliminate the
- need on your part to read Appendix B in the DESQview manual
- concerning the setup of DESQview on machines with exPANDed and
- exTENDed memory. This appendix explains the
- fundamentals of setup on such machines, but Appendix B is
- recommended (read that required) reading.
-
- This note is mainly to point out the differences in setup between
- an IBM AT with an AST RAMpage, as documented in Appendix B and
- the AST machine.
-
- The first important difference is that all of the memory supplied
- on the FASTRAM cards, including the memory that is normally
- allocated to motherboard or base RAM, is EEMS capable.
- Therefore, IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO DISABLE ANY BASE MEMORY when
- using the FASTRAM cards. Normally, out of the box, these
- machines come with 1 meg of memory. 640K is base memory and the
- rest is configured as expanded memory with the use of the
- REMM.SYS driver. So in the default configuration, in the
- parlance of Appendix B, it is setup as though you had a 1 meg
- RAMpage board backfilling to 0K.
-
- The one change that you may want to make to the FASTRAM board
- switches would involve enabling the DESQview QEXT.SYS file so
- that it might use 64K of exTENDed memory. Again, read Appendix B
- concerning the use of extended memory and the QEXT.SYS file. As
- mentioned, the machine comes configured to have 640K of base and
- 384 of exPANDed memory. Assuming that you only want enough
- exTENDed memory to support QEXT.SYS, you would want to set up
- your machine to have 640K of base, 128K of exTENDed and the rest
- expanded memory. To do this, you must change the switches that
- are on the FASTRAM card that set the Linear Memory Size from 640K
- (the default) to 768K. These settings are listed on page B-5 of
- the AST User's Reference and will not be duplicated here.
-
- Once you have set the switches to 768K, ignore the Setup error
- that occurs on reboot, and run the AST SETUP program and
- configure the machine so that it shows 640K base, 128K of
- extended and the rest expanded. Load the QEXT.SYS and REMM.SYS
- drivers in your CONFIG.SYS file and you should be ready to load
- DESQview using the XDV.COM file (again, read Appendix B
- concerning this file.).
-
- Copyright (C) 1990 by Quarterdeck Office Systems
- * * * E N D O F F I L E * * *
-