win98 o/s memory problem?

[devildog]

Someone just told me win98 will not recognize any memory beyond 128 meg.I find this hard to believe.Someone please tell me this isn't the case as i've just sent off for 256 more meg to add to my 128 i have presently.

-Devildog

 

[machow]

No... some have no problem with large amount of RAM until 512MB. I have 256 and there;s no problem at all. Who tricked you that? Hmm...

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This site is cool.

 

[Guest]

I have got 384 and i love it ,as long as u dont go above 512 u are fine and should notice that there is a lot less disk swaping (i have turned of the swap file alltogher now)
mmm maby it time to shell out for win2k

 

[devildog]

No,it was just an argument between me and my friend.His mom is taking a A+ class and a few other things and is now all of the sudden a computer guru.I told him i thought she was talking garbage and am very glad to have been vindicated by you guys.Thanks for the help.

-Devildog

 

[dmcmahon]

From personal experience I can attest that 512M is the actual limit. The OS runs with more than that, but all kinds of things start to go wrong with many device drivers. For example, I had 768M in the machine and after I installed the sound card driver, I lost the ability to bring up the DOS box, it started giving me "insufficient memory" errors! Also had lots of crashes under games. Pulling 256M of RAM cured everything.

 

[hammerhead]

Re-posting this for those who may not know why 512mb is the 'practical' limit.

The following is from MS Knowledge Base article Q253912.

CAUSE
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).