3RD-PARTY MANAGERS COMBAT PC AMNESIA.

Byline: Dwight Silverman Houston Chronicle

Trying to tame your personal computer's memory can cause you to lose your mind.

Nearly anyone with an IBM-compatible machine has had some kind of sparring match with memory settings. Chances are, you know the chilling feeling that comes from getting an "out of memory" message, combined with the realization that, yes, you're going to have to fiddle with your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files.

And before you Macintosh folks start your inevitable snickering, let me ask you this - how many of you have never had to mess with the Mac's memory settings? No one is immune, but those who use the MS-DOS/Windows combination for an operating system are more prone to problems. That's because the original IBM personal computer was designed with the idea that 640 kilobytes of random-access memory was all anyone would and should ever need.

Of course, we've gone way past that barrier. Windows 95 needs at least eight megabytes of RAM to function decently and won't soar until it gets 12 or 16 megabytes. But the original memory design is retained in even the latest systems to ensure that older programs still run.

Recent versions of MS-DOS include a memory management module called EMM386 that helped. Starting with DOS 6.0, Microsoft also included Memmaker, which automated the tedious process of trying to configure memory efficiently.

But savvy IBM-compatible owners have relied on better, third-party memory managers to handle this chore. My favorite has long been QEMM from Quarterdeck.

QEMM excels at finding places in high memory to squirrel away drivers and other programs that are launched by DOS and Windows at boot-up. Applications then have more of the original 640 kilobytes of RAM to use, making them faster and more reliable.

Now there's a new version of QEMM designed to work with Windows 95.

However, Windows 95 makes great strides in how memory is handled - so much so, in fact, that it's questionable whether third-party memory managers are necessary.

That might be the case if you only use the latest and greatest 32-bit software designed strictly for Windows 95, or if you have software drivers that automatically install into high memory. But if you're like most people, you probably rely on a lot of older, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 software, and QEMM can help there.

QEMM 8.0 works with MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. For DOS and Windows 3.1 users, it offers all the benefits of earlier versions as well as new features.

For those who use Windows 95, it comes with MagnaRAM 2.0, which compresses data in memory in an attempt to prevent Windows from using slower virtual memory. I'm fairly skeptical of MagnaRAM's claims. I've yet to see it improve the performance of any Windows 95 machine on which I've installed it. But, unlike the now-infamous SoftRAM95, at least it appears to do no harm.