Spare Stack Pages?

My Gateway computer with Windows ME installed on it is running very slow. I received this message on a blue DOS screen this morning when booting up the computer:

"There are no spare stack pages. It may be necessary to increase the settings of "Min SP" in the SYSTEM.INI to prevent possible stacks faults. There are currently * SP allocated. "

Does anyone know how I would go about fixing this?

Thanks in Advance;
Todd

 

The message indicates that there are currently nnn SPs (Stack Pages) assigned, 2 of which are the default Spare Stacks (if there is NOT already a MinSPs entry).

In order to stop the overflow, we need to increase the number of Spares by 4. The MinSPs= setting determines the number of SPARE stack pages that Windows keeps to loan out to drivers that end up using more than the one they are each allocated.

A stack is a reserved piece of memory. When drivers are fired up, they are given a 4k page of memory to use as a kind of "scratch pad" to do certain operations. This is a stack page. Some drivers end up needing a bit more than one page so Windows, by default, keeps two pages to loan out. The pages kept for loan are known as MinSPs.

Do Start > Run > SYSTEM.INI

Scroll to the [386Enh] section
Look for a MinSPs entry. If you find one, add 4 to the number.

If you don't find one, we will increase the 2 spares by 4, so add the line
MinSPs=6

Save and reboot

Eg:
[386Enh]
MinSPs=6

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=149083

(Judiously plagiarized & paraphrased from posts by SteveYandl of PC911)

 

Todd -

another slant on this would be to try to determine what's needing the extra stack pages - from what you say it's in your startups

if it's only started happening recently then there's presumably been some change there (intentional or unintentional)

==

I got similar "not enough SSPs" when using Mailwasher - it defaults to checking the accounts simultaneously - 11 email accounts! discovered each was needing an extra SSP;

changing the option to checking one account at a time got rid of the blue screens, Windows "normal" 2 SSPs was then enough to handle the situation

==

you can require more SSPs than you should if taskmon is running (that's for Win98 but ME is similar I think?)

I suspect another thing which can cause an SSP overflow is a task not completing as quickly as it should. Which may perhaps be what's behind the taskmon thing.

==

give Windows more SSPs will certainly sort the effect - but will mask the cause... unless you have changed the startups intentionally, it might be a good idea to try to find the cause perhaps?

(all assuming it was running OK without the error beforehand )

best wishes, HJ.