Windows 9x 512MB Memory limit...

[GopherMobile]

According to this article, there seems to be a 512MB memory limit in Win9x OS's. The limit itself doesn't really bother me, what does though is how the crap could it take five years for anyone to realize this? I've had 256MB of memory in my system for quite some time, and I don't even do 'that' much on it, at least compared to people that do memory intensive work on theirs (besides games), such as Photoshop or something.

I just can't understand how someone didn't decide to put more than 512MB of memory in there system even once just to say 'oooo, I have more than a half gig o' memory'! This problem seems too fundamental to have slipped by for five years. It's craziness I tell you!

 

[IsOs]

<< I just can't understand how someone didn't decide to put more than 512MB of memory in there system even once just to say 'oooo, I have more than a half gig o' memory'! This problem seems too fundamental to have slipped by for five years. It's craziness I tell you! >>



Even if you work with Photoshop or Illustrator, 512MB of ram is an overkill. You will tend to create a graphic file that no one else can use. Besides, back when Windows 98 was the latest OS you can play with, memory prices were high and most motherboard will not support more than 512MB of RAM.

You have to remember, Bill Gates said at one time, 640KB of RAM was the biggest they thought anyone will have in their computers. That's why base memory for DOS is max at 640KB.

 

[FOBSIDE]

512 mb of ram is a ridiculous amount of ram unless you need it to initially render 3d graphics with high detail. in photoshop its overkill. what would you be making? posters?

 

[TonyRic]

Actually the 640KB RAM limit in DOS is not a DOS Limit... The original x86 processor had a memory address limit of 1024KB and IBM (read IBM NOT MS) set in hardware 384KB of memory addressing aside for hardware... Thus we are left with 640K... In the old days (1985-1995) one could use certain programs to open up additional RAM above the 640K mark for use by DOS programs... QEMM and 386MAX were the best ones... But, if you knew enough about your hardware and memory addressing and HEX you could easily do it yourself... If you only needed monochrome graphics you could get up to 720KB RAM available for DOS programs... Then using a prog called DoubleDOS you could get multitasking on your old 8088, 8085 or 80286 processor...

I remember running a BBS when I was stationed at Yokota AB just outside of Tokyo in the late 80's called &quot;The Wizards Lair&quot; running FIDO BBS and DoubleDOS..

Damn we have come along ways in 10+ years...

 

[TheCorporal]

Hehe apparently none of you have run a webserver =) Ok ok I know we are talking about servers that run Linux / NT but I have seen a few servers running on Win9x, and believe me, if you are doing heavy database stuff then you NEED 512 ram. Our server has that, and we already need to upgrade to a gig! Fortunately ram is dirt cheap right now =)

 

[benliong]

Well, I agree that serving a database machine would require as much ram as you could possibly find, but win9x OSes aren't really built for all that kind of stability in the first place. You want your machine to be a serious server, do it with either NT or Linux, which I assume have no such limits.

 

[sciencewhiz]

I see no reason why somebody should need 512mb of ram on a win 9x system. There are many applications that would take advantage of that much memory, but they would all run much better in a NT or linux environment.

Do you really want to be doing heavy database work on a 9x system?

 

[DAM]

corporal: you are wrong assuming some of us have never ran a server, however the better question is how many of you have run a win9x server?


that i know of, for a large scale server, this is unheard of. the server will more than likely be running nt, novell or a flavor of *nix.




dam()

 

[BadThad]

The Corporal - Let me know when you add that ram. I'm dying to settle this issue or at least gather some more information for our mutual benefit. I posted basically the same thread before I saw this post:
512 MB Limit Thread 2

That link Gopher posted is messed, I think this is where it was supposed to point:


512MB Limit

Let's keep this going people, there's lots of good opinions and tech talk here! I love it!

Also, if anyone has some links to some benchmark tests showing the effects of increasing ram, I would love to see them. I'm going to look now.

 

[Zach]

So you tell vcache to use less memory, what's the big deal? Did I not read into it enough or is there no problem? I think the vache settings are in the system.ini? I'm in Win2K now I can't remember or tell...

Yeah I have this (duh I can read the windows directory):
[vcache]
minfilecache=8192
maxfilecache=16384
chunksize=512


And looking through the article this is listed as option 3! Jeeze people! If you are going to run more than 512 you should know about vcache anyway!