Do not use more than 512M RAM with ME

[dmcmahon]

I've been fighting instabilities and apparent driver problems since assembling a new A7V133-based system last weekend. I was unable to run most games on my GeForce2 MX board using DirectX and OpenGL, I would get terrible crashes and have to reboot with the reset switch. The DOS box wouldn't come up as long as the sound card was installed. The system was very very unhappy. This morning in desparation I pulled out one strip of RAM, reducing my system memory to 512M. Now like magic everything works fine. I can swap that strip for one of the others and things still work fine, so it's not that the memory is bad. The only conclusion is that ME has a nasty nest of bugs associated with managing large amounts of memory. Avoid!

 

[yoda271828]

I've heard many times that Win 95/98/Me can't handle more than 512Mb of memory. I love how Microsoft can sell almost the exact same kernel in Windows for six years and never bother to fix errors such as that.

 

[Jitterbug]

Windows 9x was not supose to around yet, they thought NT would have been in homes by now. The most important reason is 99% of 9x users don't have a good reason to have 512mb RAM or more. If RAM prices were not so cheap, you would not see so much of it in all these machines.
The real reason for most of these people that have 512+, is braging rights...you know, the old mine is bigger, faster, what ever than yours. Twenty years ago young kids did that with motors in cars, 100 years ago it was their horse. Same sh=t differnt calender.

 

[ejsmith2]

History is cool like that. You can study a 50-year period and see the exact same scenarios going on around the world, present day.

Anyway, w98 doesn't use the 256meg on my computer as well as w2k does. At least, not without manually telling it how to waste memory...128meg of disk cache?

 

[dmcmahon]

Thing is, my computer's a multi-OS beast with Win2000 and Linux. I use it primarily for development work, where it's not uncommon for me to run the Oracle database plus Apache and the Java servlet infrastructure, running big code recompilations, etc. I need as much memory as I can get when I'm in the other OSes doing this sort of thing.

 

[Pettytheft]

Get a second system.

 

[Guest]

I was perusing Tom's site a couple of weeks ago and they addressed this very issue.. I believe this is the answer to your problem ..follow the following link for a possible fix to your problem..copy and paste it to your URL block

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=What is Vcache?&rnk=5&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=W98

Motivation is half the battle to success..personal intiative completes the process..

 

[dmcmahon]

Thanks! This technique worked for me:

Go into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI and find the line which reads

[VCache]

Add this line immediately below it:

MaxFileCache=524288

My system is happy now, it has 768M and it still runs good under ME.

 

[Guest]

You could also try creating a very large RAM disk

~ I'm not AMD biased, I just think their chips are better. ~