I have an extra 560 megs of RAM left, why am I running out of System, User, & GDI resources and getting Out of Mem error

[Wirehead]

I just bought an extra 512 megs of RAM for my rig and I am still getting Out of memory errors. I am operating with Win98 SE, ASUS P3v4x mobo and Crucial CAS2 RAM. The rig is behaving as if I had not bought any extra memory at all. Windows and Sisoft Sandra do recognize the RAM however. What am I not doing? Do I have to change settings in the BIOS, registry or in Windows so that the System, User and GDI resources will increase? Help I do not understand. Thanks for the help.

 

[kuk]

Win9x can't handle memory properly (especially more than 512MB). Get Windows NT or 2K ... or Linux.

 

[emjem]

What do you have your Virtual Ram set at?

 

[Punamo]

What apps are you running? One app with leaking memory is enough to get you the resource problem. Try not running any app and see if it's still the case...

 

[Wirehead]

emjem,

Swap file is 1238 MB. I am letting windows manage virtual RAM. I seem to get a little more free resources that way. What do you suggest? Thanks for the reply.

 

[drewski]

Like Kuk said, Win 9x (including ME) memory management suks.

 

[elasmobreath]

Edit your SYSTEM.INI:

[VCACHE]

MinFileCache=8192
MaxFileCache=523264
ChunkSize=65536

Go here for more information.

 

[Dulanic]

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.ASP

 

[emjem]

I just thought that maybe you turned off VR. That could cause the out of memory messages.

 

[Wirehead]

Punamo,

With no apps running except Windows I have 664 megs of RAM free.

System Resources = 79% free
User Resources = 79% free
GDI Resources = 85% free

I will try the suggestions from elasmobreath and dulanic and let you know.

Thanks

 

[Wirehead]

elasmobreath,

With your recommended settings with all my background apps running, I get:

System Resources of 46% instead of 19%
User Resources of 46% instead of 19%
GDI Resources of 57% instead of 28%

That was a big help thanks.

 

[nippyjun]

Guys, do the same [VCACHE] settings described above help with increasing virtual memory even if you don't have physical memory greater then 512megs?

 

[elasmobreath]

I'd recommend Windows NT or 2000 if you NEED over 512 MB of RAM.

 

[Looney]

Did you look at Dulanic link? that explains your problem

 

[Pariah]

The 3 resources you are referring to, system, user, GDI, are not a measurement of your RAM. You can have 2GB of RAM or 16MB of RAM and get an out of memory error running the smae apps. Those three resources are actually 3 seperate 64K stacks of memory pulled from system RAM that keep track of things like apps open, window locations, etc. The stacks are holdovers from windows 3.1 which explains why they are so small. No matter how much RAM you have, those stacks will always be 64KB. When a program has a memory leak, the leak is usually referring to the inability to recover memory from those stacks which are very limited in size to begin with. Win9x is the only OS that has this configuration.

 

[Wirehead]

Moralpanic, Yes I read Dulanic's link and have been experimenting for the past hour. It was a great help. The link suggested that I limit the memory to 512 megs in the System configuration utility Advanced TAB. This actually brought my numbers down about 20%, so I jacked it back up to 800 even though I only have 768 in the rig. I also disabled system ROM breakpoint, Virtual HD IRQ, and excluded EMM A000-FFFF in the same TAB.

Now my numbers are:

System resources: 52%
User resources: 52%
GDI resources: 60%

I can now open 30 web pages at the same time on the desktop, Run an additional two hugh programs, run Windows Media Player with streaming audio and video, open Outlook express and type you this message and my resources are now 1%, 1%, 14 % respectively. I cannot do much more before I start locking up.

Hey, that is a lot better than I could do before, and I am still not using all my memory. I still have 300 megs to spare. This is a great forum with a lot of great advice. Thanks to all who helped. Any other suggestions so that I can use all of my excess memory would be welcomed and appreciated?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Pariah is right. My suggestion would be to get a real OS. Glad you've at least seen some improvement.

 

[Wirehead]

Yes, this exercise has proven to me that I need to buy Win2000 as soon as I can. I think I have heard that it is more stable also with fewer crashes. I will have to check first if all my apps that I run daily will run under 2000. Thanks, that was good advice.