win98 and 1gb of memory

[elendil]

Hi.

I am sitting at a friend and trying to get his pc to work (no, really) and first off we had a lot of trouble getting the memory to be recognized. Apparantly this motherboard requires ddr memory to be paired.

But we figured that out and got the system booting, now win98 makes a 'windows protection error, reboot your computer' during startup (nothing graphical). I was wondering if that means that windows is lame and has to crash because it cannot use one gig of memory or if it is because the two memory modules are incompatible (they are two different brands). Any help? A patch to make windows 98 function with more memory? I would really, really, really hate to have to install xp on his computer.

Any help is highly appreciated.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[gnarly]

A patch to make windows 98 function with more memory? I would really, really, really hate to have to install xp on his computer.

1) XP is a far superior OS. No, really. Best windows yet IMO.
2) My friend Lewis had to disable 512mb when he was in the same situation as you.

[AmiDog]

I believe there was a 512MB (or was it even 256MB?) limit in W98. Also, I once read that W98 was optimized for 128MB memory and adding more would not really give any benefit, wether this is true or not, I really don't know.

I also think there was a difference between W98 and W98SE (second edition). Maybe ME would work better?

[jj]

I have 512mb of pc2700 memory in my machine and windows 98se works fine.

DOOOOOOOOONTTTTTTTT put on windows ME, its the worst of  the lot.

WIndows XP is a very good OS, and will work fine with that amount of ram. I have only just got more from 256, cause XP loves ram.  But ram is cheap, £30 including next day del for 256mb PC2700 from crucial.


Failing XP put on win2k, cause u will find it hard to get win2k to crash.  winxp is 2k with bells and whistles

[Vincent]

JJ wrote:

Failing XP put on win2k, cause u will find it hard to get win2k to crash.  winxp is 2k with bells and whistles

I couldn't agree more, for us Win2k seems to be the most stable os for us.  Very reliable.

[SilvrDrgn]

Win-DOHS 95, 98 and ME all use a segmented memory model.  The System, User and GDI resources are stored in their own segment of your system RAM, and the other segment is general purpose.  Regardless of how much RAM you put in the machine, the System, User and GDI segment never increases.  "Picture" below explains:

128 MB = | S/U/GDI seg | General Purpose Seg |
256 MB = | S/U/GDI seg | General Purpose Seg General Purpose Seg |
512 MB = | S/U/GDI seg | General Purpose Seg General Purpose Seg General Purpose Seg General Purpose Seg |

This can easily be seen by starting up a Win95/98/ME computer with 128 MB installed, loading some programs and noting the amount of System, User and GDI resources that are available.  Then install 256 MB and/or 512 MB, and start up the same programs again.  The free System, User and GDI resource numbers will be exactly the same.  This is because that resource area of the system memory does not change in size even when the total amount of RAM installed does.  Extremely stupid setup, but what do you expect from M$.

I work at a company that still uses Win-DOHS 95 in abundance on their PCs.  I cannot run MS Outlook, OpenTime, TrackView, Exceed and RapidSQL at the same time on my machine because the S/U/GDI resources run out when I start RapidSQL.  My computer was upgraded from 128 MB to 256 MB in an attempt to "fix" this.  Unfortunately, the above description of the memory model reared its ugly head, and the same problem happens even with the additional memory.

I've read lots of reports that say the max amount of RAM Win98 can use is 256 MB.  Whether they're correct or not is anybody's guess.  If you're able to run with 512 MB, like JJ mentions, you might simply be lucky.

On the other hand, Win-DOHS 2000 and XP have a "Flat" memory model.  All of the system RAM is general purpose.  There is no extremely small System, User and GDI resource area to run out when you need it most.  The only exception to this rule that I can think of off the top of my head is when your system has integrated video that uses the system RAM for its video memory.  To make a long story short, if you need to use a lot of RAM and you need to use Win-DOHS, you'll have to use Win-DOHS 2000 or XP to get the most benefit.

[amigamad]

Windows 98 only supports up to 768mb of memory after that it starts to slow down the pc or cause problems, it could be that they are 2 difrent makes but i doubt it its more likely to be a dodgy sim if any thing. Ive had boot problems because of a sim which isnt much good have you tried the 2 sims on their own . Avoid installing xp its got lots  spyware in it which sends out to microsoft if anything get windows 2000 its much better than xp.  :-)

[RexxMast]

@elendil

Windows 95/98/98SE/ME only supports 512MB of RAM.
I just learned that recently. However, I did have it
working fine once with 768MB of RAM. I then went up
to 1GB of RAM, and everything went to hell!

After trying to limit the memory to 512 in msconfig,
and altering the vcache as per MS support pages, it still
would not work. I then went back to 768MB, and even
that would never work again. The only solution was
going back to 512MB. The two above solutions are suggtested
by MS, but they don't seem to work.

The only choice you have is going with 512MB or changing
the OS to Win2000 or XP to be able to use the larger amount
of RAM.

regards,

[Blitter]

Work arounds for Win9.x users with more than 512MB of RAM here

Also:

Windows 98/98SE cannot support more than 1GB memory. error message"Insufficient Memory to Initialize Windows".


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If your computer has 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of random-access memory (RAM) installed, Windows may not start. Also, when you try to start your computer, you may receive the following error message:





Insufficient memory to initialize Windows.

Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and restart your computer.


This behavior may also occur during Windows Setup, or when you try to start Windows for the first time.


RESOLUTION
To work around this issue, add the following line to the [386enh] section of the System.ini file:

MaxPhysPage=30000

This limits the amount of physical RAM that Windows can access to 768 MB. To do so, use the following steps:




Use any text editor (such as Notepad) to edit the System.ini file.

Add the following line in the [386Enh] section of the file
MaxPhysPage=30000

Save the file, and then restart your computer

Hope this helps some.

Blitter

[Vincent]

@SilvrDrgn

We managed to run Win98 with 256Mb ram with no memory problems at all.  It seems to vary from person to person.

[AdMartin]

A friend of mine runs Win98 with 896MB DDR RAM without problems. Before installing memory above the 512MB barrier, we did the vcache fix that's been mentioned a couple of times in this thread.

/Martin

Win98 do not support ram greater than 768 MB.
I had the same prob, and as far as i know there is no patch to fix it.

I agree with the others. Win XP is indeed a superior OS (compared to Win98...)
Dont expect the pc to run faster with winXP.
It will just be more stable (and more responsive).

[The_Editor]

Well....

Just to be awkward ...

My Boot drive is on a "Slide Mount".. So i can interchange between Win2kPro and Win 98.

I have....................  786Mb Sdram (Pc133) installed.

No probs with 98.  ( crashes regular though)

Win 98 actually  only uses 68mb "chunks" up to 512 Mb.  ( So I was told) Anymore  RAM is simply not used.

[blobrana]

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).



Have a look here.
http://mysite.freeserve.com/blobrana/cucd/addendum.html

for tweaking cache ram...

I  have had the same problem a few times...
still don't know why it happens... anyway I found that
it could be relative to usb devices (such as my
wireless keyboard and webcam).

When I get that problem I simply disconnect all the
usb devices, plug in a regular keyboard and then
switch on: when Windows  tries to start in
"emergency mode" (can't remember exactly
how it is call... maybe recover mode...) I just force
it to start in normal mode and all works again.

Hope this can help

Bye
zetaeffe