Isn't it less the UMA and conventional area?

Edit: To clarify, I'm kinda asking too, I always assumed because both my win98 machines show up with 1 meg less, so I figured it was the no touchy with the first meg

My 98 box reads 511MB as well. Since Win98 sometimes behaves erratically with 512 or more, and also since this same installation of Win98 reported the full 256MB back when I only had that amount of memory, I like to think of the 511 thing simply as Win98 trying to save itself. I...know that's not what's actually happening, but it almost sort of anthropomorphizes that dumpster fire of an OS, in a way.

512Mb is the technical limit of what Win98Se can address without having a meltdown or requiring patches, its likely not reading the amount correctly due to that limitation. Sounds like the same thing XP 32bit does when it has 4Gb of ram, itll only ever display 3.5 of it due to 32bit limitations.

Thanks for the replies, I've been finding the same results elsewhere, so I guess it's pretty much the norm.

Cheers!

Griff3125 wrote on 2023-12-14, 03:28:

Off the wall question, I just noticed that if I do 'properties' on my computer, it's showing 511MB's of memory.

If Emm386.exe is loaded into Config.sys, then this is what happens...

Is there a BIOS option called something like 1M memory hole? Or is my memory full of holes? IIRC there was some feature in BIOSes for compatibility, perhaps, that, for some reason, maybe, turned off 1 meg of RAM, or not. Not sure I trust myself, if you can't tell 😀

Possible that one mb is being used for some kind of error correction/detection/parity.