Windows 9x have issues with more than 512MB of ram. Depending of the setup, issues will be starting from 512MB+ to 1.5GB+.

There are many ways to solve this, but now that Rudolph Loew's patch is free, the best and simplest solution is to use his ram patch : https://archive.org/details/PATCHMEM

This will let you use the entire ram space available (other solutions are more finicky and don't let you use 3.5GB of ram)

Deksor wrote:

There are many ways to solve this, but now that Rudolph Loew's patch is free

It is actually not free. Someone just uploaded the commercial version to archive.org with the justification that the author passed away. This doesn't make it free in any country I know.

The problem is that Rudolph Loew is not avalable anymore.
However, I remember I put 768 MB RAM on my old Windows Me pc. It works well.
Do you try to modify windows\system.ini ?

derSammler wrote:

It is actually not free.

His son has made it clear that he wants us to preserve his fathers software.

It is a busy time right now but I did want to clear the air regarding the patches. I would like them to continue to be distributed, for his work to be remembered and to be beneficial to others. So, please, freely distribute what you may have in terms of the work my dad did.

Unless someone else claims the rights to this software, that makes it free in my opinion.

Unless he disinherited his son I think he should be the new right owner of this, and since he wants it free, well now it is.

Thank you, Me is now running with 3.5GB so I no longer need to remove DIMMs when I wish to boot it, but GlobalMemoryStatus() only returns 2.0GB even though SIV32L is linked with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win3 … balmemorystatus

I wonder how system properties managed to get 3.5GB

Well since windows 9x was never made to handle this much RAM, it's possible some program report an incorrect value.

Deksor wrote:

Well since windows 9x was never made to handle this much RAM, it's possible some program report an incorrect value.

It's a case of garbage in results in garbage out and the correct solution is to fix Windows 9x/Me to report correctly.

It's easy enough to read the installed memory size from the MCH and fix dwTotalPhys, but dwAvailPhys is also limited to 2GB and I suspect it's impossible to work around this.