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Can removinga small amount of ram break a win98SE Install?

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First post, by Siggypony

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So I've basically given up on trying to fix this, tomorrow I'll reinstall windows.

I have a old AMD K5 PR133 system that has 2 x 32mb Sticks 72pin EDO ram. It was running good. So I foolishly added 2 extra 16mb sticks. Was fine for a for days.

Come today I needed to remove the two 16mb sticjs because I need them for a second socket 7 system.
I start windows, and its just done... it just locks up while loading freezes, safe mode. Eventually I unistalled the drivers it started working again. Once everything detects sane issue comes back.

Wasted 3 hours of trouble shooting, adding the ram back, checking boot logs, no clues.

Anyome had anything like this happen? Can just removing ram cause issues like this normally? I dont recall windows 98se being this tepromental. 🙁

A fresh install will be nice though. I want to use the two systems for network games of Warcraft 2 etc

Reply 1 of 6, by Gmlb256

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Normally, it shouldn't break an installation and I have done something similar on my Socket 7 computer without issues. Problems arises when there is more than 512 MB RAM in Windows 98 without third-party workarounds.

Which drivers were you using? Which Socket 7 motherboard exactly? Need for information.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 2 of 6, by Siggypony

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So to answer your question. Motherboard is SL-54A5. GPU is nvidia TNT2 M64, Soundcard is Creative Soundblaster pro live 5.1 Network is a Realtek RTL8139. It's using a serial port card to get a working com port for mouse because Windows couldn't detect the mouse on the internal com ports. Ram is EDO 72pin 2x32mb. The removed ram was 2 x 16mb sticks. Apart from the Nvidia and Creative ones which came from files philscomputerlab.com, the other drivers came from windows.

Now the plottwist? I decided to boot it to get the network card model and it just started fine mysteriously and then shortly later got the biggest fright I've ever gotten from a computer in a long time.

It started screaming at me adn with really terrifying bluescreen errors ive never seen before like pulsing, i thought a cap was blowing in the PSU, but then I realised it was the headphones. I remove the Sound blaster live card and suddenly everything is working again. 🤷🏼‍♀️

So confusing. Guess I'll keep using the system for a few days and see if this stability lasts.

Reply 5 of 6, by H3nrik V!

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Memtest86 would probably be my first choice of diagnosis. You may inadvertently have misseated some of the ram in the process?

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 6 of 6, by Siggypony

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I deffinately need to run memtest on it. I forgot about that program. The computer has been working well since however, its now got an Audegy SE for sound. Im now building a second pc with a pentium 166, thats having its own funny issues. It seems systems of this age are always a bit off. First one sound card issues, second one wont reconise lba disks right, but using a raid card with drivers to get that one running 😅 getting the drivers onto the disk was a mission. Networked games not far off now 😀

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