1G of RAM

[tranman]

I'm running Win98SE on my mother in law's machine. Due to her work with lots of photos, I upgraded her machine from 256M to 1G of DDR RAM. The installation went well, and the computer registered that it had 1G RAM installed. The problem is that I'm not getting any additional resources free, and in fact, got some memory low blue screens. I removed one of the sticks of RAM to bring it down to 512M, and everything is working OK (no blue screens). I've been researching it a bit, and it appears that Norton and a whole bunch of other things grab the extra RAM (above 512M) for itself, and doesn't allow it to be used for its intended purpose. Is there a fix for this? I'm sure others out there are using 1G RAM or more also...


thanks, tranman

[yellohut]

Windows 98 can only address 512MB of RAM, so anything above that would be wasted anyway.
That could be what caused the problems.

[Doobie]

Run SYSEDIT and look in system.ini for a section that says [vcache] which will be empty. Add a line directly under it that says exactly this: MaxFileCache=524288 Save and exit, reboot.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q253912

[tranman]

If I make that change to sysedit and it doesn't work, will I be able to change it back?

[Doobie]

yes

[galaxian]

Originally posted by yellohut
Windows 98 can only address 512MB of RAM, so anything above that would be wasted anyway.
That could be what caused the problems.

Nonsense!

[Cricket]

Adding more RAM to a computer will not do a thing for low system resources. Read this (http://www.aumha.org/win4/a/resource.htm).

You gotta limit the amount of background programs loading up with Windows. When you first boot that computer up, how much system resources does it have free?

:) Cricket

[tranman]

I set aside 52 MG for video cache as directed in the previous post. It says I have 989 MGs of RAM with 61% system resources free. When I open a very large album in Adobe Photoshop Album, the system resources drop to between 18% and 11% depending upon what picture I open. When I print, I can print small black and white but when I open a color photo, a blank sheet comes out of the printer. I tried to change the print preferences to print directly to the printer but that didn't help.

[GaryRouth]

See if you can get your normal system resources at about 90% free on the average, before opening any photos. Then if you drop to the 50%-60% range, you should still be Ok for working in Adobe.

I'm going to assume that the change you made was to add the maxfilecache=524288 line to the [vcache] section of the system.ini file? [which would limit that "virtual cache" to 512mb, not 52 = which I'm guessing is a typo]

To get your system resources into the 90% range, go to the site recommended by Cricket, and cut your background processes down to a minimum. Multimedia centers (QuickTime, RealPlayer), Instant Messengers (MSN, AOL, etc), Office suite handy-dandys (extra toolbars,findfast, Office startup = completely unnecessary), and others don't need to run from the minute you turn on your PC, especially if you wish to work with large PhotoShop images. Many of the processes running at Startup are there because of a setting in the "Options" or "Preferences" menus of thier parent programs.

I run at 95% free system resources on three different Win98 machines (have AntiVirus running, and QuickRes), and have no trouble opening or printing as big a photo as PhotoShop can grab.

Is your printer a laser or an inkjet?
. . . Gary

[p.s. ... here's another current thread on this topic http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90094, I pasted a link into my reply in that thread that has a procedure whereby you remove a module of memory to get the total to 512 or less, and then add the line to system.ini - it also mentions a System Configuration setting that you can try if you have no luck with just the system.ini edit]

[yellohut]

Windows 98 does have a RAM limit of 512MB, and can act funny if you go over that... (crashes, errors, etc...) unless you tweak the vcache setting as discussed above..
even then, In my experience it will still not address it all.
I've run win98se with 768 MB and 1GB before, but it never addressed anything above around 500, no matter what I threw at it... 2 games, browsing, virus scan, e-mail, mp3's... everything going at the same time.
and even then it only cached a little over 300MB.

[galaxian]

Conclusion?

If it doesn't need it, it won't use it

[TwoRails]

Hi tranman,

Yes, Win98 can have problems with too much memory. There are "workarounds" that allow phyisical memory of over 512, but you will not normally see any performance increase. You can run the benchmarks youself. I never had a problem running 512 on my Win98.2 boxes and that includes video editing. No fuse no muse, no problems.

Also, memory and "resources" are two different things and are not related. Resources and it's limitations are a Windows ME/98/95 problem.

HTH

TwoRails