Win98 + lots of ram, will it work?

Son of Blam

Right. I've got 384 megs of ram in my PC right now. (It's a PIII 500). It's running Win98.

I've heard lots of people say "Win98 can't handle more ram than 256 megs, anymore will actually make it slower" and then I've heard people say "Nah, Win98 can handle up to a gig of ram" and then I've heard people say "Win98 can't handle any ram at all, you better give it all to me"...

So what's the deal? How much ram can Win98 take before it goes backwards or something?

-Son of Blam

chernobyl

lots of ram wont degrade performance but win98 will always go's for the swap file rather than RAM and after 256 the performance jump is not noticable.

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Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Kali

I've heard a lot of ****e about this in the past, usually hovering around the 192Mb mark, after which Windows assigns the extra to virtual memory anyway.

And that makes no sense to me at all, Windows being a 32bit O/S has a 4Gb limit, however only 2Gb of which is available to programs and data.

And remember this one fact:
In this new technological era memory size has a direct connection to penis size.
So keep your memory and laugh at everyone elses small penis.

_CreeD_

Performance was an issue in pre-pentium2 days, when most chipsets could only cache the first 64mb of ram. Win9x sits at the top of your ram and thus would run in an uncached area when you went above this. P2s cached up to the limit of their onboard cache in MB (ie. 512) P-3's and Athlons dont have a limit.

If you go over 512mb in Win9x add this to your system.ini (Or your system will be flakey as hell, better to do it before you add the RAM)

[Vcache]
MacFileCache=xxxxxx (in kb), ¬96-128,000 should be fine

Actually a good idea is to download ramidle from Tweakfiles, it has great options for setting this and other cache values. And lets you force windows to always use ram unless absolutely necessary (It works, after turning it on I ended up with no swapfile (Though it was still enabled)).

Victor

Some DOS-based applications scan read 96 MB as (96-64=32MB) and will only try to avail of the 32MB. If you have 64MB it tries to read it as 0MB. "Realising" there is no RAM availablethe application stalls. (the particular applicatin I am thinking of is the game Harpoon)

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Kill, kill, kill the laser mice.

Yurmasyurda

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Son of Blam:

Right. I've got 384 megs of ram in my PC right now. (It's a PIII 500). It's running Win98.

I've heard lots of people say "Win98 can't handle more ram than 256 megs, anymore will actually make it slower" and then I've heard people say "Nah, Win98 can handle up to a gig of ram" and then I've heard people say "Win98 can't handle any ram at all, you better give it all to me"...

So what's the deal? How much ram can Win98 take before it goes backwards or something?

-Son of Blam</font>

Note below..

512Mb maximum memory windows 98 subsystem will allow.

If you put anymore than 512mb into your machine, 98 will not work unless you change some system properties which basically means that even if you have 1 Gig of ram windows 98 will still only use 512mb.

Also I have noticed even with the 1 Gig of ram and system properties changed 98 systems seem unstable and will only physically work with 512mb.

Hope dat helpes

_CreeD_

Yurmasyurda, I already mentioned that, and how to overcome it. Its just a bug in the vcache driver and not a limitation in Win9x (not intentionally anyway).
The facts are as Kali mentioned, Win9x has a 4gb addressable limit, 2Gb for apps, 2 for system.
I have 768mb and have seen Win9x eat it up when dealing with large Wav files.
Add the System.Ini line, add the ram, ignore the myth.

po0k

What about mixing CAS~ numbers? my mobo only lets me set one CAS# for the whole board. if i have CAS 2 and CAS3 mixed do i ahve to run it at CAS3 all the time?

Supercell

This is just my experience, so read into it what you choose,
I too have a box that runs win98 and as a hobby.
I do a lot of video capture which is helped to a large extent by the amount of ram in the system, i pumped it up to 768, tweaked the system.ini etc but no matter what, the simple fact is, it runs slower above 512 in memory intensive operation (a lot more dropped frames during capture) and frequently gives blue screens illegal ops etc..they all go away below the 512 threshold.
Same system dual boots with win2k..it just gets better and better the more ram i throw at it, however some of the apps i use do not work in win2k so hence that box has 512 and won't go above it.
Bottom line IMHO , is on a win9x system, going above 512, is not advisable if you are going to use applications that will attempt to use it.

_CreeD_

Cakewalk Pro 9, GigaSampler and Cooledit 2000 are the only ones I have that pushed the ram, all ran perfectly for me. It might just be dependant on the apps too.

SyxPak: Try it at Cas2, if unstable just step it down. Both have to run at the same speed, but some rated as Cas3 will do Cas2 anyway.

[This message has been edited by _CreeD_ (edited 01-08-2001).]