Space Available in Excel Setup Displays Incorrectly

Last reviewed: November 1, 1994
Article ID: Q70720

SUMMARY

When installing Excel 3.00, you may notice the "Space Available" reading in the Microsoft Excel Setup Options window to be less than the amount you read from a Chkdsk DOS command outside of Windows. After proceeding through Setup by clicking the Setup button, the following message may display if the "Space Required" exceeds the "Space Available":

   Insufficient disk space on specified destination drive

This may occur even if you know that you have just enough disk space to install Excel.

You will get varying disk space readings, inside Windows compared to outside of Windows, if you are using a temporary swap file on a 386 computer running in 386 enhanced mode. To verify this, go to the Windows Setup icon in the Main group and see if it says:

   Swap file:      Temporary

If it does, a temporary swap file is being created on your hard drive each time you start Windows. When Windows starts, it normally creates a 1024K swap file. It can, however, increase or decrease in size depending on the memory needs of the system.

MORE INFORMATION

To increase the amount of disk space available shown in the Excel Setup, do one of the following three things. Note that if these options don't already show in the SYSTEM.INI file, you must create them:

Change the location of the swap file to a drive other than the one on which Excel is being set up. To do this, make the following changes in the [386Enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI
```
      PagingDrive=d:
```
```
    where d: is the new drive you wanted the swap file to be
    stored on.
```
You can limit the size of the temporary swap file by making the following changes in the [386Enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI:
```
      MaxPagingFileSize=512
```
Where Windows would never create a swap file larger than 512K. The 512 can be changed accordingly, depending on the needs of the system.
Disable the swap file from being created in the first place. Make the following changes to the [386Enh] section of the SYSTEM.INI:
```
      Paging=no
```

Making the above changes would be optimal on a 386 system that is running very low on disk space but has a lot of RAM. Disabling or decreasing the swap file size will increase space available on the disk but will take away from the virtual memory.

REFERENCES

"Microsoft Windows User's Guide." Version 3.00, pages 520, 526-529.

KBCategory: kbsetup
KBSubcategory:
Additional reference words: noupd

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Last reviewed: November 1, 1994
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