Appeal No. 2002-0058
Application No. 08/859,865
the claim language supports their assertions [answer, page
9]. Appellants respond that the main memory of claim 1
contains compressed items so that the estimate of free space
is not as simple as checking for free space in memory
without compression [reply brief, page 3].
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of this
group of claims. We agree with appellants that there is no
teaching or suggestion within the applied prior art for
estimating the free space in a main memory which contains
pages of compressed items. Since the amount of compression
varies when storing data, we agree with appellants that
determining an estimate of free space is not trivial. The
examiner also has not explained why the availability of
space would even be a concern in the system of Richter, even
if Richter was storing compressed data as argued in the
rejection.
Appellants argue claims 3 and 14 as a third group of
claims [brief, page 4]. Since claims 3 and 14 respectively
depend from claims 2 and 13, and since we have not sustained
the rejection of claims 2 and 13, we also do not sustain the
rejection of claims 3 and 14.
Appellants argue claims 5-7, 16-18 and 25-27 as a
fourth group of claims [brief, page 4]. With respect to
-9-
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