How much RAM is too much?

[Trick000]

How much RAM is optimal for a win98 PC? I've heard it slows down past 512... why?

[imbest123]

thats a win98 problem.(the 512mb of ram thing) and the most widows can hold is 4gb so maybe like 1.5gb is enough for ram unless your a power user and really need it like for editing or something.

[Trick000]

yeah what is that win98 512MB problem?

[imbest123]

i dunna know wut that problem is but i dont think it was ever fixed which is pretty retarded.

[DragonBreath]

It is fixable, it's the default vcache setting that causes the problem. I'm sure if you search vcache here in the forums you'll find the fix.
db

[imbest123]

ic good thing i dont use win98 got rid of it once win2000 pro came out then went on to win xp pro

[Cricket]

I remember seeing somewhere that the RAM sweet spot for Win9x systems was 384MB.

Here's sort of an explanation from Microsoft of the 512MB RAM/Win9x limit thing...
"The Windows 32-bit protected-mode cache driver (Vcache) determines the maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM that is present when Windows starts. Vcache then reserves enough memory addresses to permit it to access a cache of the maximum size so that it can increase the cache to that size if needed. These addresses are allocated in a range of virtual addresses from 0xC0000000 through 0xFFFFFFFF (3 to 4 gigabytes) known as the system arena.

On computers with large amounts of RAM, the maximum cache size can be large enough that Vcache consumes all of the addresses in the system arena, leaving no virtual memory addresses available for other functions such as opening an MS-DOS prompt (creating a new virtual machine)."

Cricket