FAKEIT.SYS

Fakes the amount of physical RAM seen by DOS, Extended Memory Managers and Windows 2.0-Windows 3.11.

Purpose

FAKEIT.SYS lets a DOS environment think the machine has less physical RAM than is actually installed.

It is intended for old memory managers and Windows 2/3.x environments which can be unreliable or not work at all on machines with unusually large amounts of RAM:

• Windows 2.x/3.0 > 16MB
• Windows 3.1 > 256MB

It provides the same utility as the HIMEMX '/MAX' parameter but without requiring you to use HIMEMX.

Requirements

• 80386 or later processor.
• DOS 3.x or later
• FAKEIT.SYS must load BEFORE HIMEM.SYS, HIMEMX, QEMM386, 386MAX, EMM386, JEMM386 or any another extended-memory manager you're banging

Install

Just download FAKEIT.SYS directly and place anywhere you like.

You can also download RAMPROBE.COM, another tiny utility that provides some useful diagnostics on how memory is being reported. You can use this to confirm that your RAM is being limited successfully.

Syntax

In CONFIG.SYS:

  DEVICE=C:\FAKEIT.SYS /MAX=16384

/MAX is TOTAL visible RAM in kilobytes, not only memory above 1 MB. Examples:

  /MAX=8192     8 MB total
  /MAX=16384   16 MB total
  /MAX=32768   32 MB total
  /MAX=65536   64 MB total

If /MAX is omitted the default is 16384 KB. Accepted range is 1024 through 4194303 KB.

Typical HIMEM/EMM386 setup

CONFIG.SYS:

  DEVICE=C:\UTILS\FAKEIT.SYS /MAX=8192
  DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
  DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE