Windows98 Memory Cap

[Blue Falcon]

Is it true that Win98 does not accurately use memory above 128MB?

[ReBoot]

No, it's actually 320 meg that windows 9x can cache. Anything over that can degrade performance (a bit).

[http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin/forum1/noncgi]

Anything above 512 Meg seems to cause Windows 9x to become totally unstable. Learned this the hard way. :P

[KonKord]

384mb is the value chappies. This isnt down to an ini setting - i wish it was - it's down to how the swap file works. It doesnt think anyone has that much ram on a home machine, windows 9x being a home OS, so the swap file kicks in when handling large files which will run OVER 256mb of contiguous ram.

I learnt this by speaking to a programming admin. He's da bomb. But, for example, in Photoshop you can change the size of the swaop file and memory usage in the program itself, so it doesn't affect that as much <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

[mahdi]

SO, 384 is the memcap on WIn9x...NOT 512? If so, it's a good thing I stopped at 384 <IMG SRC="smilies/biggrin.gif" border="0">

[Bryanr]

OI, this again. There is only a cap on the virtual memory addresses. The vcache (Virtual Memory.) has a maximum value of 800megs starting from the base of memory (Above the first 640KB or so.).

This is shared with various other caches, like agp apeture.

The max ram if your agp is set to 64, is 768MB.

First thing to get your performance back is to set swapfileusage=1 in the system.ini under [386enh]. This allows windows to go to ram first, not to virtual memory. The virtual memory when using vcache expands the required cache by default there by decreasing both physical ram and virtual ram available. The swapfileusage=1 prevents this, by only using the swapfile when needed.

If you have over 1GB of ram, turn of virtual memory as it will be useless for you.

[Evan5599]

512MB Ram is the most possible you can use in windows 98. But you have to set the File System to Network Server. That way it will utilize all 512 MB of ram. Otherwise it only uses 128 MB of ram. If you dont believe me go to microsoft.com and they will tell you the same answer. I too thought for a long time there was a way to use above 512, but unfortunatley there is no safe way to say that you can use above 512. If you are using above 512 MB of ram just use windows 2000, it is actually quite stable now that 2 service packs are out.

[Evan5599]

Check out what Microsoft has to say!
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.asp

[KingRob]

That is most probably why the 815 chipset only supports 512MB RAM max - Intel thought all OEMs would jump on the bandwagon for their 'superb' 810/815 mobos and sell it to unsuspecting home users - and we don't want home users to get too clever with their pcs.... <IMG SRC="smilies/tongue.gif" border="0"> When in doubt, whip it out...

[Platypus]

Originally posted by Mr. T:
<STRONG>Check out what Microsoft has to say!
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.asp</STRONG>

This is interesting. It confirms what Bryanr said. The limit is with Vcache, not Windows.

Note the implications of one of the workarounds Microsoft suggests:

Use the System Configuration utility to LIMIT (my emphasis) the amount of memory that Windows uses to 512 megabytes (MB) or less

This indicates that otherwise Windows will use more memory. The problem is with Vcache running out of addresses, not with how much memory Windows can make use of.

[sneaker]

I had 1024MB of RAM on a machine running Windows ME for some time (because of hardware problem that prohibited me to run Win2K), and I had to limit the memory to under 1000MB or I couldn't use my GeForce2… some NVIDIA driver problem and then under 512MB to avoid the "Out of Memory" error messages. It didn’t bother me because I was just running Windows ME temporarily until I received a new motherboard. Who would like to run Windows 9x with more than 512MB anyway!

[Blue Falcon]

Wow. Thanks for the info!

[Bryanr]

The thing to remember is that virtual memory is the problem. As vm needs to map your ram in order to allocate the neccessary cache size. If you disable the vm, and have 1024MB of ram you should be fine.
Otherwise stick to 512MB of ram, and enable conservativeswapfileusage=1 flag in your system.ini, under [386enh].