Using the W98 MSINFO32 is the work around I just came up with, does anyone know how to fix the code 15 I get for the IDE controller please?

There are programs that break when there's "too much" RAM installed. There's also VCACHE that can grow too big and leave no room for stuff in the "system arena" region in CPU address space which will lead to various "not enough memory" related errors. MaxFileCache=131072 in SYSTEM.INI may fix some of the problems.

Tiido wrote on 2026-02-17, 21:39:

There's also VCACHE that can grow too big and leave no room for stuff in the "system arena" region in CPU address space which will lead to various "not enough memory" related errors. MaxFileCache=131072 in SYSTEM.INI may fix some of the problems.

Thank you for the thought, but no luck. I assumed/guessed it needed to be in the VCACHE section. I have:

1[vcache]
2MaxFileCache=131072
3
4[MSNP32]

This happens as soon as the system has been booted so I can't see how the VCACHE that can have grown much at all.

I wonder if it's down to the zero size page file, I guess with 3GB WMe thinks it does not need one.

I have always had MaxFileCache in 386Enh section, in fact I have never seen a vcache section...

Anyway, even on first boot to desktop without doing anything lese on most of my machines, without MaxFileCache and more than a 1GB of RAM it is impossible to start command prompt or DOS programs as they fail with "not enough memory to start..." type messages... But with the limit in place, there won't be out of memory messages.

I have pagefile almost always disabled. Only program I know that doesn't like it is Office 2000 which then complains how it cannot start Office Assistant.

You can put MaxPhysPage=40000 to limit memory and see if it makes a difference. Rloew's patch should cure most such issues though...

Tiido wrote on 2026-02-18, 12:41:

Rloew's patch should cure most such issues though...

I installed with 1GB then used patcher9x-0.9.91-win32 and selected option 3. Before doing this neither WMe or W98SE would boot with 12GB installed.

I dropped to single 1GB DIMM and MSINFO32 is OK, but MS-DOS crashed out.

I then set MaxPhysPage=20000, rebooted and MS-DOS still crashed out so I went back to 12GB with the 512MB limit.

I don't really need that much memory on W9x and plan to leave it limited to 512MB.

I wonder, is there an API to read the VCACHE size and usage?