System to busy or become unstable

I received this message several times in the past and the tech people told me that usually means not enough memory. Fine,I had 256 more ram installed and tonight I received the message again. The computer had been rebooted about 2 hours before. Needless to say,I was not happy to see this message again. What should I be doing now to fix the problem? I have 98SE on HP computer. TIA

 

If you haven't enough memory (RAM) the system will use your hard drive as virtual memory and provided you have enough disk space and enough of that has been allocated to a swapfile (where data can be swapped between RAM and disk) then you shouldn't run out of memory. If you allow your system to determine how big your swapfile should be, as most folks do, then you shouldn't have a problem.

Windows, in this case, cannot figure out what the problem is and has only managed to determine that it is one of two.

The most common reason for the message is a protection fault where some memory is being used by more than one application. Windows runs in, so called, protected mode disallowing this. When it happens the system will then become unstable - the virtual memory manager will not know whether it is coming or going and is running for cover.

If it happens rarely, as in most cases and seemingly yours, just reboot and be thankful that it is rare. 98SE is, for the most part, a stable system but it is not perfect. Its more stable than 95 but not as stable as XP.

If it happens often then the only fix is to determine which application is misbehaving; if any application is indeed misbehaving. Keep a note of what you have running when this happens. Windows won't know. Its a bit like our making a bad registry edit. Windows will know it has a bad registry but it won't know who the culprit is - an application or us!

Not much of an answer for you but some things we just have to put up with.

 

Thanks Gamma

The problem started when I got zonealarm I think. I got high speed internet at the same time. I installed a router also at the same time. I have a total of 320 Ram(my old 64and new 256) and have lots of harddrive space left(16Gig) If I increase the virtual memory I wonder if it would still happen? Thanks again for you very clear description.

 

“If I increase the virtual memory I wonder if it would still happen?â€

That will have no bearing on the subject. Adding three items at the same time makes it difficult but then it wouldn't be advisable to go with broadband and wait a while before installing a firewall.

Just see how it goes. If the problem starts to occur too often then come back and mention it. What is 'too often'? You know your machine better than anyone - you'll know the answer to that.

 

98 starts to have a slight problem with more then 256 mb of ram, even more so with more than 512 mb. Your Vcache can take all your memory and not give it up if needed.
You can try this, open the System.Ini file located in the Windows folder with Notepad. Look for the section [vcache] and add this line under it, so it appears like this. This is a quarter of your ram.
[vcache]
MaxFileCache=81920
Now that you have all that memory, you would like to use all of it. Under the section [386Enh], add this line.
ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1
This forces windows to use all your memory, minimizing the swap file usage, and will increase performance.
Reboot for changes to take affect.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit ZA is the cause of this.

 

“Your Vcache can take all your memory and not give it up if needed.â€

This was the case with Win95 but not with Win98. See Memory Management.

“ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1
This forces windows to use all your memory, minimizing the swap file usage, and will increase performance.â€

This is not true. See MSKB 223294. The issue is to do with how and when swapfile buffers are written out ie swapfile usage and not swapfile size.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...port/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.asp&NoWebContent=1

 

Irrelevant.