Guide to running Me above RAM memory limit?

[piikea]

Having stumbled upon this forum & specifically this thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/day-day-running-...e-1.html&s=

Is there a "How-to" guide to doing this somewhere? I've searched & cannot find one. And is this something a semi-novice can do (safely!) ?

I've been crawling along w/ 384MB of RAM & it's driving me nuts lately.

Thanks

[LoneCrusader]

Having stumbled upon this forum & specifically this thread:

Day-to-day running Win 9x/ME...

Is there a "How-to" guide to doing this somewhere? I've searched & cannot find one. And is this something a semi-novice can do (safely!) ?

I've been crawling along w/ 384MB of RAM & it's driving me nuts lately.

Thanks

If you don't mind spending $20, I recommend RLoew's patch. I've been using it for over a year now, never had the first single problem with it.

Supposedly there are other ways of doing it, and others on this forum apparently have done so, but I never managed to get any of them to work.

Good to see another 9X/ME user

[dencorso]

While LoneCruzader is right, and I'm also a satisfied customer of RLoew's, I did manage to have 98SE running with > 1 GiB before I turned to the RAM Limitation Patch, because I wanted to actually use all the RAM I had in the machine more fully. So I know for sure both ways work. As you have ME, if you intend to go to something just below 2 GiB you may make do without the patch. Look carefully at eidenk's machine in the Day-by-day user thread. He run just with plain ME. Now, to anwer your question, no, there is no "How to" yet, but that only means you can be the one to write it. And, of course, myself and many others from the list can and will help you do it. But we've got no working crystal ball, right now. So I suggest you post your machine configuration and detais as it is now, in your next post, together with two lines about what do you intend to do, that is, to haw much RAM would you go to, from you present RAM amount. And don't forget to download your board's manual and give it a good reading, because you can only go as far as the hardware supports, and different boards support different maximum amounts of RAM. Cheers!

[loblo]

Look carefully at eidenk's machine in the Day-by-day user thread. He run just with plain ME.

He is now running another system with 2GB of physical RAM but he has limited the amount Windows can use to 1995MB by adding a MaxPhysPage=7CB00 entry under the [386Enh] section of system.ini.

There may be issues with some applications not willing to run with that much RAM installed though (Corel Painter 8 for example) and the way he found to fix them all is to have a fixed swap file of very small size (100MB in his case ATM). Disabling entirely the swap file did yeld other apps not willing to start (MS Digital Image Pro 9 and Adobe Illustrator 10 for example)

Next he will buy the RLoew patch and put another 2GB in his rig.

Cheers

[piikea]

Well I am quite a novice so I doubt I could write much of a "How to"......I'm having enough trouble figuring out my motherboard. Its a Dell 8100 but I have no idea if the manufacturer was dell or someone else.

I have no specific RAM amount. I just want to increase my PC's speed cuz it's seems god awful slow to me. Only using 384mb of RAM (4 slots = 2 128MB sticks & 2 64MB sticks) currently & would've added more long ago except I was told 512 was the limit so it wouldn't do any good.

1GB should be plenty to have things moving a little faster!

Manufacturer Dell Computer Corporation

Model Dimension 8100

North Bridge Intel i850 Revision A2

South Bridge Intel 82801BA (ICH2) Revision A2

CPU Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 1400MHz

Cpu Socket Socket 423 mPGA

System Slots 5 PCI, 1 AGP

Maximum Capacity 1024 MBytes

Memory Slots 4

Error Correction Single-bit ECC

*** btw - I'm going to be moving so won't have access to my machine for a bit....will have to return to this project when this happens.

Edited January 21, 2010 by piikea

[dencorso]

Thanks for the detailed info.

So, let's see:

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1) According to the List of Intel Chipsets, your i850/ICH-2 chipset has a limit of 2 GiB RAM at the maximum. It uses PC800/600 RDRAM.

2) The online Manual of the Dimension 8100 agrees with that, and mentions that the biggest memory module it accepts is of 512 kiB. Rambus memory (=RDRAM) needs all the slots populated to work, so whatever the arrangement used, it must have a stick in every slot.

---------

My suggestion would be to replace both 64 MiB sticks by 512 MiB sticks, resulting in jumping to 1.25 GiB RAM.

Here's how to procced:

1) Add a MaxFileCache=393216 to the [vcache] section of your C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI and save it.

2) Shut the machine down. Disconnect physically the machine's power cable from the wall power outlet.

3) Wait for at least 10 minutes, to allow the boards capacitors to discharge.

4) Substitute the required modules. Here are detailed instructions on How to replace RDRAM.

5) Reconnect to the power outlet and turn on the machine. The BIOS should recognize the memory change and test it.

The system should now boot and then start windows, so that, all going well, you should then get back to windows.

---------

Good luck!

[piikea]

Thanks for the great instructions....I will get some 512's & give it a shot asap! (& post the results)

[piikea]

Thanks for the great instructions....I will get some 512's & give it a shot asap! (& post the results)

ok, finally got move over with & was able to add the 512's & make changes as instructed & am up & running again!

1280 MB of RAM now! Thanks to all!!