HIMEM.SYS
HIMEM.SYS is a DOS device driver which allows DOS programs to store data in extended memory via the Extended Memory Specification (XMS). This device driver is of particular importance because various versions of Microsoft Windows that ran on top of the DOS operating system required HIMEM.SYS
to be loaded to be able to run.
As of MS-DOS 5.0, HIMEM.SYS
was introduced and could be used to load the DOS kernel code into the High Memory Area (HMA) to increase the amount of available conventional memory by specifying DOS=HIGH
in CONFIG.SYS
.
HIMEM.SYS
provides access to the memory beyond the first 1 MB of space and thus is required by Windows 9x/Me in order to load the graphical portions of the operating systems.
In FreeDOS, the matching file is named HIMEM.EXE
and can be loaded from the FreeDOS configuration file named FDCONFIG.SYS
or CONFIG.SYS
.
In Windows 9x, there is also a command-line loadable version of HIMEM.SYS called XMSMMGR.EXE. It can load extended memory services after the system has booted into the command prompt. This allowed Windows Setup to load even if HIMEM.SYS was not loaded.
See also
- Conventional memory
- Extended memory
- Expanded memory
- High memory area
- Upper memory area
- EMM386
- Memory manager