Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

MiniMax wrote:

Not just you. I can tripple-boot into Win95, Win98 and XP on my 2 GHz AMD 2600+ with 1 GB RAM just fine.

How much VCache do you set, by the way?

VCache?

VCACHE is virtual disk cache memory space allocated for win9.x systems.

Under system.ini:

[vcache]
MinFileCache=xxxx (kilobytes - minimum 512)
MaxFileCache=xxxx
ChunkSize=xxxx (default cache block size. I think 512bytes is default)

For me I usually had VCACHE in an static flavour, that is, Min and Max were the same value. The drawback was that amount of memory couldn't be freed.

You can usually forget about the ChunkSize value. I never noticed any difference.

I don't think I touched these values. If you want to know more about my experiences with Win95, you can read it here:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/1-vt20949.html

*** I am going split this thread, okay? ***

make sure you set vcache to use no more than 512mb or it can cause problems
this program has presets for it
cacheman
http://www.thpc.info/dload/cacheman.zip

MiniMax wrote:

I don't think I touched these values. If you want to know more about my experiences with Win95, you can read it here:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/1-vt20949.html

*** I am going split this thread, okay? ***

Wait; you successfully run Win98 with 1GB of RAM, without touching VCache at all? 😳

Or maybe you put 256MB RAM first, installed Win95 and Win98, and then change the RAM to 1GB later? Am I correct about this?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Wait; you successfully run Win98 with 1GB of RAM, without touching VCache at all? 😳

Or maybe you put 256MB RAM first, installed Win95 and Win98, and then change the RAM to 1GB later? Am I correct about this?

It has been so long ago that I don't remember exactly what I did. I don't remember having to do anything special in connection with the Win98 install.

And I am not exactly running it with 1 GB of RAM. I have 1 GB of RAM on board, but 128 MB is shared with the integrated video, leaving 896 MB free.

shared VRAM is shadowed and so becomes invisible to most OSes.

I've never really seen a benefit by messing with them. You need to tweak them if you have >512MB RAM tho. VCACHE will lose control of itself and use all your RAM.

I advise setting MaxFileCache to 20% installed ram maximum.

I seem to recall some MS articles claimed Win98 couldn't run with more than 512MB and others said it couldn't tolerate more than 1GB and had to be set lower if the system had more than that.

There were two items that could be set in SYSTEM.INI to help, depending on what was causing the problem:

[386Enh]

rem 896MB for Win9x
rem MaxPhysPage=38000
rem 768MB for Win9x
MaxPhysPage=30000
rem 640MB for Win9x
rem MaxPhysPage=28000
rem 512MB for Win9x
rem MaxPhysPage=20000

[vcache]

rem 512-640MB
MinFileCache=524288
rem MaxFileCache=655360
MaxFileCache=524288

Reference Microsoft:

Q181862 - Specifying Amount of RAM Available to Windows Using MaxPhysPage - Win9x
Q181966 - System Configuration Utility Advanced Troubleshooting Settings - Win9x
Q253912 - Out of Memory Error Messages with Large Amounts of RAM Installed - Win9x
Q304943 - Computer May Reboot Continuously with More Than 1.5 GB of RAM - Win9x

The numbers are the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article numbers. I think they don't put the "Q" in front anymore.

Hope this might help.

Can this thread get stickified? I believe the WIN.INI settings are valuable for anyone of us who want to install Win98 in modern machines (read: large RAM).

Seems pretty sparse, not very helpful to most people and well....kind of lame to be stickied. If it was not well known already or a comprehensive guide to 9x then yeah we could sticky it, but stickying a minor piece of information just clutters up the thread.

maybe in deep thought after a cleanup although I'm a bit on dosfreaks side with the question how useful this is.