DOS Loadhigh

An internal command starting with DOS 5 that loads a program into the UMA (upper memory area: 640K-1M) in 386s and up. It requires that the HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE memory managers be loaded and the dos=umb command be present.

If you have programs that need expanded memory (EMS), the following three lines in CONFIG.SYS are required to use Loadhigh. The RAM parameter informs EMM386 to manage both the UMA and expanded memory:

   device=\dos\himem.sys
   device=\dos\emm386.exe ram
   dos=umb

The following example uses the NOEMS parameter to inform EMM386 to manage only the UMA and not expanded memory:

   device=\dos\himem.sys
   device=\dos\emm386.exe noems
   dos=umb

If the lines above are in your CONFIG.SYS file, you can load programs into upper memory. The following example, which can be run from the DOS prompt or in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, loads POPUP into the UMA. If POPUP is too big to fit into an available, contiguous memory block, it will load below 640K.

   loadhigh popup  or  lh popup

To load a device driver into upper memory, use the Devicehigh command in CONFIG.SYS instead of Device; for example:

    device=ansi.sys      below 640K
    devicehigh=ansi.sys  above 640K

See DOS Dos and DOS Mem.