low memory

I am running win98se I have 768mb ddr memory I keep getting a low resource error. How can this be. I even shut down all applications in the background by using msconfig it still doesnt help. I even went as far as reformatting my drives.

 

That is a very large amount of memory for 98. You might try setting the actual amount of memory to be used to a smaller amount and see if that helps. My Win98 operated very erratically when set to use 1 gig, but fine when I limited memory usage to 512 megs.

Run: msconfig
and try setting max mem to 512.

 

Win98 has problems with more than 512 mb of memory, due to the Vcache taking up too memory and not giving it up.Try this, open the System.Ini and add this line under the [Vcache] section, like this.
[Vcache]
MaxFileCache=262144

Or you can use Abraxas's advice, I believe his idea is better in the long run.

 

I don't know about that. I have 5 computers on a home network and all are running 768 megs of PC133 ram except mine which is running 640 megs of PC800 ECC RD Ram.

Low resources usually point to stuff running in the background. I agree that you should check for spyware and other things that are loading at startup (and are not needed). A lot of programs like Real Player and Quicktime will add to the start menu and even if you remove them from the start up folder, they will still load. Use msconfig to see what is there and that can be removed.

 

Hmmm...I guess I don't have that problem. In my system.ini it reads:

[vcache]
MinFileCache=49152
MaxFileCache=196608
ChunkSize=16384

Then again, I use Memturbo and that allows me to set those #'s.

For min, 1/16th of total ram
For max, 1/4 to total ram

 

The guidelines you quote are the (antiquated) ones from Win95 days.
With 512MBs for ram and an OS that knows how to use it, why place limits on the File Cache?
(btw in case you were unaware, you MIN setting is actually dedicating 50-odd Megs of RAM to the file cache, whether you need it or not.
So, it you are running a memory hungry program that requires little file cache, you could actually be in a paging situation for no reason.

 

I'd ditch MemTurbo if I were you. This may solve your problem in and of itself. These so-called "memory-freeing" apps operate on a false premiss about memory management and themselves use resources that they purport to "free ". Besides, with all that RAM, why would you need such a thing? That chunk size is inordinately large, too.

I'd go with markp62's recommendation, or no vcache settings at all.

 

I agree, Abraxas - all secondary memory managers are a waste of time. I used to run one on W95 years ago, and was comforted by it keeping a buffer of 8Mb on a 32Mb machine. Programs seemed to load a little faster, but then I thought a bit more about what actually going on. A program would load, the memory buffer would drop, and then the manager would reclaim it, causing paging out.

Priograms could only utilise a max. 24Mb on a 32Mb machine - that's a waste of RAM! I ditched the MM (which itself consumed almost 1Mb) and found that I was usually using less than 32Mb anyway.

I ALSO found that my Windows Resources (and that's what the original query was about, not RAM) rose from around 70-80& to over 90%. They also stayed at between 80 and 90% for as much as a couple of DAYS, whereas with the MM running, they would drop as low as 50% after as little as 12 hours. A little web research showed that such MM's are Windows Resource gobblers, as they cause fragmentation of the Resource memory areas with their constant grabbing of RAM to restore the "buffer ". This is often referred to as "resource" or "memory" leakage - it's not, it's fragmentation, and operates in a similar way to HD fragmentation.

More sophisticated MM's also duplicate Windows global memory management, and will usually fail, because they can't prevent Windows from doing it! What results is a struggle between the two, with Windows usually winning, as it should, because it doesn't do a bad job, overall.

I (tweaker that I am!) installed a little "Resource Alarm" proglet which would alert you when Resources dropped below a set level., only to find it consumed a staggering 30% of my precious Resources itself. That was when I really became aware of the dangers of "over-tweaking ", which can become an end in itself - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it "

In joeygug's case, he'd do well to get Wintop - I think it's in the Windows Powertoys package, and will show all the hidden background tasks that CRT-ALT-DEL or MSconfig won't. There may be some interesting stuff showing up there which he should investigate.

 

Wintop is a great utility, works with 95 and 98, do not know about ME, but should.
Getting rid of MemTurbo is a good idea. A program using up memory while keeping memory free, yea right. It does this by telling the operating system a large program is being loading into memory, this causes data code to be shoved into the Swap File. Then nothing is actually loaded, and the memory is free. Then the data code will needed to be reloaded from the Swap File, causing unneeded emptying and filling up of the Vcache. Windows 98 has good memory management on it's own.
The bad thing about free memory, is that it is wasted memory, bottom line.