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dlwulfeFlag for United States of America

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fat32 - to many drivers

I keep getting the "Low on Disk Space" dialog box and Win98 has me do a "Disk Clean Up" more than twice a day. I thought my answer to this problem would be converting my drive to FAT32 but when I try I get a message that it can't convert because config.sys has to many device drivers. It said to REM out some of them so I have enough space to continue converting. How do I know which ones to REM out? Is this just temporary so that once I'm converted to FAT32 I can go back to Config.sys and remove the REMs? Is this really the answer to my "Low on Disk Space" problem? I have 64 mg of RAM. If I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, your right!!
Thanks for the help...Donna
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netmage

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demarb

Actually, having the config.sys load drivers isn't a very efficient way for Win98 to operate. Those are 16 dos drivers (usually) that don't work as efficiently as the 32 bit windows drivers. Try renaming your config.sys and autoexec.bat files and then rebooting and let Win98 find all the hardware for you (you will need current drivers for all your hardware). This will aslo utilize your memory more efficiently and allow you to upgrade to FAT32.

Also, how big is your drive and how much free space do you have?  Windows likes 10% of the drive empty for use as a swap file and may or may not use all of it at a time. So you may want to clean up your drive and free up more space as well.
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Before I grade Netmage's answer, I would like to respond to Demarb's comment which asked the questions, "How big is your drive and how much free space do you have?".
I have a 2 gb harddrive. Here is additional infor obtained from msinfo32.exe:
  32mg RAM memory
  65% system resources free
  Windows managed swap file on C: 94 mb free
  Available space on C: 94 mg of 20aa mb(FAT)
Well, it appears that you have enough free space (although keeping your computer cleaned up never hurts) and 65% resources should be enough (I typically have 85-90% free unless I'm running a bunch of programs, these resources are used up by the device drivers in config.sys). You said in your question that you had 64MB of RAM but msinfo32 reports 32MB of RAM so we'll assume that msinfo32 is correct. I would still try eliminating all devices out of your config.sys and see if that works, if windows uses its own drivers rather than the 16 bit dos drivers it runs faster and cleaner.
Thanks for accepting my answer.

In my answer i had to assume a less than 2gig HD for fat16.
Also, as you had said that you weren't to sure what to do, i had to post an answer that would be the safest non permanent option. You didn't include any information on your config so it was assumed all things were ok except for the fat32 error.

Netmage