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Hoser
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 4:47 pm

Can someone help me? I am running windows 98se. I have 724meg RAM installed, and the OS doesn't recognize any more than 511 meg RAM. Is there a fix for this, or am I doomed to suffer until I get XP? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx
 
SecretSquirrel
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 9:13 pm

On 2002-03-03 15:47, newhoser wrote:
Can someone help me? I am running windows 98se. I have 724meg RAM installed, and the OS doesn't recognize any more than 511 meg RAM. Is there a fix for this, or am I doomed to suffer until I get XP? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx


724MB is a very odd amount of RAM to have installed. My thought is that you have a bad memory module and the system isn't recognizing the final 256MB properly. Depending on what you memory configuration is, start pulling DIMMs until you get a proper amount of RAM (128MB, 256MB, 512MB, etc).

Win98 will recognize up to 768MB ok. Beyond that it has problems as will actually blue screen with over a gigabyte.
 
DiMaestro
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 9:40 pm

I'd check with your motherboard manu and see if it will recognize more than 512. Intel's 815 is on that comes to mind as not recognizing more than 512 megs of ram.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DiMaestro on 2002-03-03 20:41 ]</font>
 
Speed
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 9:48 pm

I suspect it might be a chipset /motherboard thing more than anything else. Anybody remember the 430TX chipset?

Run MSConfig and make sure there's nothing obvious that's limiting max memory first.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Speed on 2002-03-04 02:35 ]</font>
 
Coldfirex
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 10:01 pm

Windows 95/98/98SE/ME can not recognize more than 512mb of ram unfortunately. Its not even supposed to work correctly when there is more.
 
Speed
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 10:56 pm

Coldfirex, I don't think that's right. I've been hearing that rumor ever since RAM got cheap, and so far its been hooey. Like I said, there was one case where there was a 64MB limit in how much main memory could be cached, but even that didn't affect how much RAM an affected system could use. According to everything that I've read in the technical manuals, Windows 9x can use RAM right up to its 2GB VM limit.
 
SecretSquirrel
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 10:56 pm

Here is the MS technote on the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... us;Q253912

In fact, it may be the solution to that problem that is causing your machine to only recognize 512MB of RAM. Just a thougt.
 
Coldfirex
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Sun Mar 03, 2002 11:26 pm

Thanks SS. It says to basically trick windows into only seeing 512 of the memory. Of course hardware could be the problem, but probrably only if its older hardware, maybe pre-pII. I remember my old pentium 1 computers motherboard couldnt use anything past 128. If it was installed performance was decreased substantially.
 
HowardDrake
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:05 am

On 2002-03-03 22:26, Coldfirex wrote:
Thanks SS. It says to basically trick windows into only seeing 512 of the memory. Of course hardware could be the problem, but probrably only if its older hardware, maybe pre-pII. I remember my old pentium 1 computers motherboard couldnt use anything past 128. If it was installed performance was decreased substantially.


Just for reference, that was due to the fact that cache in P1 systems only cached the first 64 megs of memory. PII systems increased that, but I remember that being a big problem with P1s.

-Howard
 
Coldfirex
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:10 am

Thanks for the heads up HowardDrake
 
SecretSquirrel
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:12 am

On 2002-03-03 22:26, Coldfirex wrote:
Thanks SS. It says to basically trick windows into only seeing 512 of the memory. Of course hardware could be the problem, but probrably only if its older hardware, maybe pre-pII. I remember my old pentium 1 computers motherboard couldnt use anything past 128. If it was installed performance was decreased substantially.


I can attest to the fact that it is true. Had the problem on a KT7A-RAID with a 1Ghz Tbird in it. Stuck in 1.5GB of RAM and the damn thing wouldn't boot into Windows. I did finally get it to go with 1GB by jacking around with the AGP arpeture size, though it wasn't particularly stable. Finally fixed the prob by going to 2k.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SecretSquirrel on 2002-03-03 23:30 ]</font>
 
SecretSquirrel
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:20 am

On 2002-03-03 23:05, HowardDrake wrote:

Just for reference, that was due to the fact that cache in P1 systems only cached the first 64 megs of memory. PII systems increased that, but I remember that being a big problem with P1s.

-Howard


I'm afraid you've got a couple of memory bugs confused. The whole 64MB cachable thing was something that hit linux. It may have hit Windows as well, but I only had probs with linux. What would happen is once you crossed 64MB of RAM, the linux kerel would report an amount of RAM equal to RAM-64MB and you had to pass a parameter to the kernel to tell it how much RAM was available. This bug is do to how the early (not NT based) Windows OSs allocate virtual addresses for the memory cache.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SecretSquirrel on 2002-03-03 23:29 ]</font>
 
Speed
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:24 am

/me shakes head Sheesh.
 
K-Wulf
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 12:56 am

No SecretSquirrel, I think he's right about that 64MB bug in Pentium1 systems. It was a problem specific to the i430TX series of chipsets. The 430HX didn't have that prob. It's like he said, it just couln't cache anything over 64mb.
 
Speed
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 1:12 am

Ah, <b>T</b>X! Now it's coming back to me! Time for some revisionist history...

I had one of the afflicted motherboards, but it's been a hand-me-down for a long time now. Linux has always detected the correct amount of memory for me; I never had a need to pass kernel args like that. Windows? We'll see. I'm building a Win98 VM right now, with 768MB assigned to it.
 
SecretSquirrel
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 1:44 am

On 2002-03-03 23:56, K-Wulf wrote:
No SecretSquirrel, I think he's right about that 64MB bug in Pentium1 systems. It was a problem specific to the i430TX series of chipsets. The 430HX didn't have that prob. It's like he said, it just couln't cache anything over 64mb.


Hmmm, /me should read more carefully. I missed the bit about performance degredation and all. That is correct, and it was a TX problem as you say. Too many different memory problems through the years, to hard to get straight. Did some digging and found the memory size bug I was referring to. In older BIOSes, the call that reported the memory size was limited to 64MB. More than that and it would overflow returning a bad memory size.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SecretSquirrel on 2002-03-04 00:46 ]</font>
 
Speed
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Mon Mar 04, 2002 3:33 am

For the record, I installed Windows 98 with 768MB RAM, and it detected all 768 just fine. So if the problem is with detecting RAM above 512, as the question states, Windows is not the culprit. Now if the matter is caching, then we know what to do...
 
Hoser
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Wed Mar 06, 2002 9:00 am

Thanx for the tips guys (I assume) I guess I should have given a little more info on my system. Celeron 900 CPU, ASUS TUV4X motherboard, I re-installed my memory, and found one stick was bad. So now I have 2 256 and 1 128 installed, and still the same problem. It posts alright, but when I check my system in control panel it only says I have 511 installed. Once again, any help would be appreciated.
 
Derek Andersen
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Wed Mar 06, 2002 9:09 am

Quick clarification: when you say that "it posts alright," do you mean that it actually shows the correct amount of memory (640MB) during post, or just that it doesn't give you any errors?


Derek Andersen

(I just realized that hardly anybody (myself included) capitalizes POST anymore...)
 
Hoser
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Wed Mar 06, 2002 9:21 am

That's exactly what I mean. It recognizes the right amount of memory at post, but not while running. No errors come up while running, but it hangs once in a while.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: newhoser on 2002-03-06 14:49 ]</font>
 
HowardDrake
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Sat Mar 23, 2002 2:20 pm

Nice to know I'm right about some things :grin:.
If I remember correctly the HX didn't have the problem but the VX might have. I loved the HX chipset I had a Tyan Tomcat III with dual P166MMX processors and 256M of memory. My first duallie.....
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