Precision T3500 and A20 line?

Hi MacMarty15221,

Are you actually booting to DOS or Win 9x or what?

I found this thread suggesting an edit to the config.sys file. 

Let me also rally some of the old timers and direct them to this thread.

Some things that comes up on several sites about this, when doing a google search, is bad memory and or himem.sys is missing or causing the problem.

See THIS Microsoft tech article  and ANOTHER Microsoft tech article.

Thanks, Jack.

Of course, when I said old timers, I include myself.

:emotion-2:

Well, folks, we have a resolution of the issue, sort of. Here is the official answer from Dell.

"As per our conversation here is the link to the utility that may assist with running your application. Dosbox. The architecture of the T3500 is far different from the older units and the amount of memory that has to be addressed by your DOS program will cause such a problem. I would recomend that the autoexec.bat on your floppy disk be reconfigured to account for the system change or the dosbox utility be used to emulate the environment needed to run your program."

Craig M

Senior Tech, Dell Workstation Support

Further study on our part shows that the "A20 line" feature is present on ALL Intel processor chips. The feature exists to maintain backward compatibility for code written for the 286 processor. The feature works on every Optiplex system we have tried, and it also works on the Precision T3400. But not the T3500.

Reasonable minds can differ on this outcome.

Some will argue that it is unreasonable to tie down contemporary architectures with baggage reaching back to the 286. Apple does not support OS8, Microsoft is probably not answering support requests for DOS, or Windows 98 for that matter.

Others say that by dropping this feature in the T3500 BIOS, (and perhaps hardware,) Dell breaks the lineage of the "standard PC", which has largely been 100% backward-compatible over the entire ancestry of the WinTel PC. They argue that this is clearly a Dell engineering decision, an undocumented break with defacto standards that renders the T3500 useless for hard-real-time applications based on PCDOS or MSDOS kernels.

We won't be buying any more of these. Your Mileage May Vary.

 For anyone who cares...

This problem can be fixed by adding "/M:1" (without quotes) to the HIMEM.SYS line in your CONFIG.SYS file.  It seems that the T3500 is not identifying itself correctly.  The T5500 doesn't seem to have this issue.