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Windows 98SE not seeing RAM upgrade

B

buckmasterson

Senior member
My Nephew called last night after upgrading his RAM. He has a Dell desktop that uses pc100. He picked up some PC133 at Best Buy, stuck it in and booted. The bios detects it, but Windows 98SE doesn't. His machine has 2 sticks of PC100 and an open slot. He put the new pc133 in the open slot. Any ideas?
 
windows 98 is a weird OS. When I had my CUBX-E asus motherboard, I installed 1 gb of RAM and 98 could only detect 512 MB though the BIOS showed 1 GB of RAM. I upgraded to win 2Kpro, and the problem was cured.
 
Originally posted by: PsharkJF
Win98se will not detect >512 MB ram.
Click to expand...

Really? So it won't even see it in system manager? I always thought it would display, but that 98SE would cache the hard drive before using it...
 
Originally posted by: PsharkJF
Win98se will not detect >512 MB ram.
Click to expand...

Yes it will, stop spreading FUD.

ThugsRook ran for a while with 1 gig of ram in win98,probably still because he loves win98se. 😉
 
From Anandtech FAQ, I quote:

Date: Jun 13, 2001
Category: Operating Systems
Author(s): Andy Hui

All 32-bit Windows versions, including Win9x, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP (apart from Win2K/WinXP AS and DC) can ADDRESS up to 4GB of RAM.

Win2K/XP Advanced Server supports up to 8GB of RAM and Win2K/XP DataCenter can support up to 64GB of RAM.

Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Millennium Edition can only physically ACCESS a maximum of 2GB of RAM.

Win9x/ME can go up to 512MB of RAM before it requires an adjustment to the vcache to use more RAM. Under the [vcache] section of system.ini in the Windows directory, add the following entries:

MinFileCache=65536
MaxFileCache=65536

The above figures in kilobytes limit the VCache to a fixed size of 64MB and is merely a suggested size. The VCache can have a size of up to approximately 500MB.

For more information regarding the 512MB RAM limit and the workaround, see this article.

End quote

PS - I've been running 1g RAM with W98SE for a while now..................
 
alot of pc100 motherboards cant run pc133 correctly. (motherboard flaw)

the AT FAQ is out of date.....
max memory = 1.5gb
the correct figure for 1gb of memory = MaxFileCache=262144 (or 524288 if you want even more)
for 512mb of memory = MaxFileCache=181077 (or 262144 if you want more)

HTH 🙂
 
alot of pc100 motherboards cant run pc133 correctly. (motherboard flaw)
Click to expand...

Not necassary. The BX and older chipsets do take PC-133, but they are a bit fussy if you install more than 256 megs per DIMM. Some PC-133 modules that worked on the 845/ p4-266 series chipset wouldn't work on the BX chipset because they could take a max of 256 megs per DIMM. (ie 32megs*8chips) and not (64*4chips). The 815 detects the newer pc-133 mem modules though......
 
id suggest he removes the older stick and see if the system can run on just the new stick.
if it cant run, then it cant run. nothing you can do.

🙂
 
He removed the old RAM as you suggested, and it won't boot with the new RAM in any slot, let alone slot 1. Good thought though! I'm thinking the board doesn't like the RAM (It's K-Byte). I'm sending him an old stick of Crucial PC133 I have and we'll see what it does.
 
Originally posted by: buckmasterson
He removed the old RAM as you suggested, and it won't boot with the new RAM in any slot, let alone slot 1. Good thought though! I'm thinking the board doesn't like the RAM (It's K-Byte). I'm sending him an old stick of Crucial PC133 I have and we'll see what it does.
Click to expand...

probably high density. BX boards don't like that. neither do i810, iirc.
 
I recently *cough* attempted to make some changes to my win 98se as I upgraded to 768 DDR pc 2100 ram

However when I was doing it I was used this http://www.putergeek.com/vcache/index.shtml which just seemed to screw up my computer. I think I entered amounts that were too low for my comp, and now its having problems starting up (I'm pretty sure I can change it back by just loading it as the secondary HD on my other comp...again...boy I have to do that far too often)

So, before I mess it up even more, when I do change the vcache settings this time - what numbers would be best to use? (primarily gaming) and is there anything else I should watch out for?

thanks ahead for any help!

edit: dang well that link isnt working, but it does work if you go to this page and scroll down a few posts and use his link http://forums.anandtech.com/me...rc&highlight_key=y
 
ok, i got pass that initial part now, yet I'm still having problems getting World of Warcraft to run on my comp.

I changed my numbers to the ones listed here, yet warcraft crashes or stalls whenever I try to load it up now. I read the MS site and I cant seem to find what the problem is now short of lowering my total ram to 512
 
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