I somehow got away with never adding this in my autoexec.bat.

I don't remember much with regards to tweaking that stuff.. running memmaker.exe comes to mind. Also loading the CD driver in extended memory mode (MSCDEX.exe /E). Then there was himem.sys etc

I would really love to see a good blogpost on all these things so I can finally learn what all these things actually did -- back then it was just trial an error. All the tweaks I had to make to free up "conventional memory" despite having a lot of RAM.