Often, in the computer’s BIOS setup under the Advanced Chipset Features, there is an option for Memory Hole at 15M-16M, with the available options of Disabled and Enabled. This setting allows users to enable or disable the 1 MB of memory required by some ISA expansion cards.

  • How to enter and exit the BIOS or CMOS setup.

Enabling this feature decreases your memory by 1 MB and allow the few ISA cards that require this memory to work on your computer. However, with some motherboards, enabling this feature could also disable all memory above 15 MB and cause other significant issues. Because ISA cards are rarely used today and because many motherboards don’t even have an ISA slot on them, we recommend keeping this option at the default setting of Disabled.

  • See our memory definition for further information and related links.
  • Memory (RAM) help and support.