The Perils Of Installing Windows 98 When You Have Large Amounts Of Ram Memory

[pmaddock]

FYI,

I went through much aggravation with installing Windows 98 on my computer (as part of my dual boot Sytem Commander setup) last night. No matter what I did, all that I encountered were "Windows Protection Error" and "Illegal Program" messages. I did some internet searches and read that Microsoft had a fix for the problem, but had to be called to receive it. The Microsoft person was very nice about it, but couldn't alleviate my problems. No matter what we did and removed in safe mode, the Windows Protection Error message kept surfacing and locking up my computer upon bootup. We finally thought we found the problem, I re-installed Win 98, and it happened again. I did some more internet searches and found a mention about how you can have too much ram for Windows 98 to handle (I have 1 GB). I reduced my ram from 1024 to 512 mb in msconfig - all my problems went away. Just wondered if anyone else experienced this Windows Protection Error phenomenon, especially running a system with more than 512 mb ram.

PM

[ssahl]

I have never heard of this problem, but unfortunitly I have never had that much RAM on a system of mine. I installed Win98 on a computer that had a 486 CPU and only had 16MB of RAM (and these were SIMMs!) and eventually got it to work. What kind of RAM is this? PC133? SDRAM or what? Does this still happen if you unhook all current hard drives, get a new one hook up only one, and then fdisk, format, and then do a clean install? If you still have the same problem after trying that I would be supprised, also what about if you try installing Win2k or some other OS?

[pmaddock]

SSAHL,

Check out my signature. I am using RDRAM on a dual boot 2.2 GHZ P-4 dual boot system (Win XP and Win 98SE). I didn't have any problems at all with the XP side, just the 98 side. I read on the internet about how Win98 will not work very well with over 512MB ram, adjusted my setting in msconfig, and everything worked like a charm. I just had a little problem installing some soundblaster software, but that's another matter. Thanks for the reply.


PM

[glc]

This is a known issue that has been discussed many times in this forum and there are articles in the MS knowledge base referring to it.

[Blakhart]

After about 128 megs you will not notice any boost unless you do vid editing/photoshop stuff.
Runs better with 256 or less.