win98 mem issues

Sd,

   Try letting windows 98 manage your memory for you.  See if that helps.

Try limiting your virtual memory and disk cache, I've also 128mb and here's my config:

Virtual memory = 64Mb min. and no max.
Disk cache = 8192 min. and 12288 max.

You can adjust the Virtual memory by going System>Performance>Virtual Memory
And you can adjust the disk cahce by opening 'system.ini' and under [vcache] add these line:

MinFilecache=????  (8192 hence 8mb for me)
MaxFilecache=???? (12288 hence 12mb)

Save and reboot.  This's been working well for me.

>>on booting 98 system monitor shows my system to have only 24 meg of unused memory, my disk cache size to be 73 meg.surely i should have more than this available.

from above of your comments, you seems to be looking at the performance of your system, that is a normal thing to happens if you are loading many things in the startup folder and in the Task MANAGER. what you can do is go to Virtual Memory and setup a FIXED SWAP FILE at about 150 megs.

Unused memory is memory that Windows is not using as disk cache or application memory. As such it is *really* unused and may as well not be there. Ideally the amount should be zero, but this would leave no memory for Windows to juggle with.

24 out of 128 is not too bad, it means that Windows is using over 80% of your memory.

You should start worrying if Windows is starting to use the swap file exessively. Monitor the amount of page faults rather than the amount of free memory. If this goes up *then* it's time to think of expanding your memory.

On my machine with 128Mb and above suggested settings, I've 68Mb unused with Netscape running.

This program will help clear up as much memory as you need.

Windows is lousy at memory Management and this is why this program exists.

Its called Freemem Pro and there is an evaluation version.

www.3bsoftware.com/freemem.htm

netmage

everybody machine is different. when it comes to unused memory there is not exactly an amount.