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I have been the victim of Win98's limited abilities. When I bought a new
computer and went from a P/133 64MB RAM 4GB disk to a P3/600 128MB/133 RAM
30GB disk, I found myself unable to run the same number of programs
concurrently on the new system without getting low on system resources and
gradually coming to a screeching halt. It was so bad that I installed a
freeware resource monitor that would warn me when my resource use had
reached 90% so I could close an app while I still could and avoid a freeze.
Although not perfect, my solution was to move to Windows 2000. W2K is based
on the NT kernel (not Win 9x) and resources are limited by RAM, not a
Microsoft induced 128 KB resource pool. After installing W2K fresh (not an
upgrade from W98) and getting W2K drivers for many devices, as well as
upgrading some programs that would not run in W2K, I'm basically a happy
camper.
I do get about 3 freezes a week, which I suspect is due to either a disk
driver or my RAM, but I would gladly trade this for the previous scenario of
having to nurse my PC along, running only a few apps, and always teetering
on the edge of resource lockup.
If you have the ability to remove a RAM chip and go to 512 MB you can test
to see if your system becomes stable, although slightly slower. Personally
I think you're a prime candidate for W2K because the amount of hardware
you're asking W98 to support seems beyond it's capability. After all, I
don't think you'll find very many home PCs with more than 512 MB of RAM. NT
servers, yes, but not PCs.
If you decide to go the W2K route, do your homework first and run the
compatibility test to identify all the components on your PC that are not
W2K compatible, and get the drivers you'll need before hand. I would
strongly recommend getting Power Quest's Partition Magic 6.0 and creating an
NTFS partition that you can experiment with, while you stay live in your W98
partition. You should also create a FAT32 partition and put in it any files
from your W98 environment that you want to be able to access from either W98
or W2K. For me this included my Outlook .PST file, my Netscape bookmarks,
my Quicken database and anything else I needed in either environment to me
functional. If I'd tried to do this conversion without Partition Magic, I
would've had a real serious mess on my hands. It contains Boot Magic, which
presents a menu on boot that defaults to the OS you select and waits a
selectable number of seconds before going into that default OS.
You may be successful in getting your W98 to cope with 1GB of memory, but I
don't think Microsoft is going to be spending all that much time trying to
resolve a problem that only affects those customers with more than 512 MB
... especially when they want to see you moving to W2K anyway.
Bill
> -----Original Message-----
> From: neo [mailto:neo1@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 4:49 AM
> To: Bill Irwin
> Subject: RE: Any hardware help?
>
>
> Bill
>
> My message to the board is below. I have gradually been
> tracking this down.
> Any thoughts?
>
> I just upgraded my system to 1024MB (1 GB). I now have system freezes.
> Symantec states there is a problem with their memory tester
> in systems with
> more than 256MB. MS's Knowledge Base states there can be problems with
> Windows 98 system when the RAM exceeds 512MB. Apparently
> there is a limited
> amount of memory that controls memory addressing and vcache
> in system.ini.
> One can lower maxdiskcache but this lowers disk performance.
>
> please help
>
> neo1@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
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