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Each morning I have to set my memory size to, say, 20m. The default, 1m, is not sufficient for my data. Is there a way of changing the default setting?

More than one person replied to Statalist with "see help profile".

With the 01Feb2002 update of Stata 7, however, there is a second answer that cannot be found in the manual, which is, type

        . set memory 20m, permanent

You can do that regardless of operating system; it works under Windows, Macintosh, and all the Unix systems. Typing the above does the same thing as

        . set memory 20m

and it tells Stata to remember that, so that the next time Stata comes up, it is to come up with 20m of memory; see help memory.

This was part of the Stata/SE improvements we made, except that this improvement was not limited to Stata/SE. Before the update, the set memory command did not do all the syntax checking it should have. You could type

        . set memory 20m, anything you want to type here

and it would set the memory to 20m rather than complaining about a syntax error. Thus, even if you do not have the update, typing set memory 20m will appear to work. The next time you invoke Stata, however, you will find it did not.

Please note that in Stata for Windows and in Stata for Unix, the initial memory size may be specified on the command line to invoke Stata. For Windows, the command line to invoke Stata might look like

        c:\stata\wstata.exe /m1

which tells Stata to start with 1 megabyte of memory. For Intercooled Stata for Windows, this is the "factory-installed" default.

If the initial memory size is specified on the command line in this way, it overrides the set memory, permanent setting.

You can refer to Appendix A, section 6 in the Getting Started with Stata for Windows manual which will explain how to change the command line in Windows that invokes Stata. We suggest removing the /m option from the command line so that only the set memory, permanent setting will be used.

You can check if you have the latest update by typing

        . query born

and verifying that your born is 01Feb2002 or later, or just type

        . update query 

to see whether Stata thinks your executable needs updating. If it does, update query will tell you what to do next.

We often release new features in the updates. Typing help whatsnew after installation of the update tells you about them.