Question

I’m going through the http://www.SecurityTube.net video series on Windows Assembly. The examples make use of the mem.exe Windows utility, but I have found that it isn’t installed on my Windows 7 64-bit install. In doing a little research, I have found that mem.exe is not designed for the 64-bit architecture. Is there an alternative out there, or an updated version of the file?

EDIT: I’m actually looking more for something that will replace “mem /d”, which gives an actual limited mapping of the memory space, if I’m not mistaken. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Mem.exe is a remnant of the old DOS days. AFAIK, it’s been pretty much meaningless in Windows since 32-bit was introduced.

The output of mem.exe in a command window in WinXP SP2 is this:

655360 bytes total conventional memory
655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
580224 largest executable program size

1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory
      0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
 941056 bytes available XMS memory
 MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area

Note the second and last lines, which both refer to MS-DOS. Also note the mention of extended and XMS memory, and High Memory Area, none of which carry any meaning now on 32-bit Windows (and less on 64-bit).

Also note that this was run on a machine with 2 GB RAM, but the total contiguous memory is only listed as 1 MB.