Win9x RAM
Saturday, October 6, 2007 at 8:18 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by DNA
(553 messages posted)
PS: Win9x won't even run at all if there is 2 GB or more of physical RAM installed,
because 2 GB of total memory (swap file and physical memory combined) is all that
Win9x can address, and unfortunately Windows is designed to work with a large swap
file (or 'page file') on the hard drive (and this is even more accentuated under
Windows NT versions, such as 2000 and XP). Even more fun is Linux, which demands
a Swapfile partition (which would actually be the best idea for Windows, as
well!)
Funny how your machine would only go in Safe Mode (with the 1 GB stick installed),
I would have to remove one of the 512 MB RAM sticks to get my Athlon 3000 machine
to boot in Win98 Safe Mode!
I was able to get a 1 GB RAM machine to boot in Win98 Safe Mode once, because this
machine had 64 MB of the system RAM allocated to onboard video, so Win98 saw '960
MB' of RAM. I still had to use the MaxPhysPage line in System.ini, because
at '960 MB' of RAM, it had strange side effects, such as no browser being able to
connect to the Internet (IE, Firefox, Opera), which were immediately fixed when MaxPhysPage
was set to '30000' (768 MB) and the system was rebooted. It's still running fine
for its owner a year later...
If you're building a Win9x box with something like a Socket 754 AMD / Socket 775
Intel budget Mainboard/CPU combo (with only AGP and PCI slots, of course!), the board
likely won't have 'dual-channel' RAM, so you can get one 512 stick and one 256 stick,
and have 768 MB of RAM (enough to run Win XP or Linux well, for 'dual-boot' systems...)
----------------------------------------------------------
Athlon 1.1 - 768 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Home
Athlon 3000+ 64 - 1024 MB RAM = 98SE (@768 MB RAM) & XP Pro
IBM ThinkPad PIII 933 - 384 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Pro SP2
Windows 2000 Server in the basement
- Written in response to:
- re: RAM upgrade problem (gewg_: Friday, October 5, 2007 at 8:04 pm)
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