Windows 98 SE supposedly becomes unstable with more than 512 MB of RAM, though opinions on the severity of the problem vary widely and it's quite possible that the unofficial service pack added the necessary fix.

Can you get a bootlog.txt, as suggested by, for instance, http://www.dankalia.com/tutor/01002/0100201150.htm ?

I've had the same freezing at boot or soon after with w98se plus unofficial service pack on an athlon 1GHz with 256MB RAM. It doesn't happen without the unofficial pack. Suffice to say I'm not using that pack anymore.

Those packs are more trouble than anything in my opinion. Pointless.

I'm only using the Unofficial Service Pack 2.1a, which supposedly contains a combination of the official patches released by Microsoft over the years.
I've also experienced some issues with versions 3.x of the Unofficial Service Pack and have since fallen back on version 2.1a.
The only thing that I installed from the later versions was the USB stack.

So far, version 2.1a hasn't given me any problems.

Jorpho wrote:

Windows 98 SE supposedly becomes unstable with more than 512 MB of RAM, though opinions on the severity of the problem vary widely and it's quite possible that the unofficial service pack added the necessary fix.

Can you get a bootlog.txt, as suggested by, for instance, http://www.dankalia.com/tutor/01002/0100201150.htm ?

Windows 98se works perfectly out of the box with up to 1gb of ram. Actually 1280mb of ram if I remember correctly. Anything over that and it refuses to load. There's a system.ini fix to get it to 1.5gb of ram but it's unstable. There's no need whatsoever for the unofficial service pack.

kanecvr wrote:

Windows 98se works perfectly out of the box with up to 1gb of ram. Actually 1280mb of ram if I remember correctly. Anything over that and it refuses to load.

Maybe on your machines.

I keep forgetting what the precise mskb articles are.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/253912
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/184447

After booting to safe mode and opening bootlog.txt, it appears that the .ttf font files were marked as loadfail. However, one device, VPD, was marked as failed. According to bootlog:

[000BB543] DEVICEINITFAILED =VPD

A bit of searching suggests that problems with the fonts and "vpd" are not uncommon, but there is no obvious solution.

Maybe it would be best just to get the memory question out of the way once and for all. If you don't want to open your computer up and remove a stick, then you can limit the RAM using HIMEMX (assuming you can still access the hard drive from a boot floppy).

I had the same problem when I installed "Force UDMA", to fix this I had to disable UDMA in the bios and uninstall this software.

Jorpho wrote:

Maybe on your machines. […]
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kanecvr wrote:

Windows 98se works perfectly out of the box with up to 1gb of ram. Actually 1280mb of ram if I remember correctly. Anything over that and it refuses to load.

Maybe on your machines.

I keep forgetting what the precise mskb articles are.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/253912
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/184447

Only vanilla win98 has issues with more then 512mb of ram. Win98 SECOND EDITION works fine with 1GB out of the box.

Here: Win98 Socket 939 Voodoo 2 SLi Build! (a.k.a. Glide Overkill)

kanecvr wrote:

Only vanilla win98 has issues with more then 512mb of ram. Win98 SECOND EDITION works fine with 1GB out of the box.

Here: Win98 Socket 939 Voodoo 2 SLi Build! (a.k.a. Glide Overkill)

I cannot dispute the reality of your personal experience. I can only suggest that your experience may not apply to all machines and all configurations.

Jorpho wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Only vanilla win98 has issues with more then 512mb of ram. Win98 SECOND EDITION works fine with 1GB out of the box.

Here: Win98 Socket 939 Voodoo 2 SLi Build! (a.k.a. Glide Overkill)

I cannot dispute the reality of your personal experience. I can only suggest that your experience may not apply to all machines and all configurations.

So far all win98 machines I've build with 1GB of ram have worked flawlessly. I've build 5 such machines so far:

- Athlon XP 2600+ / Shuttle AK35GTR / 1GB DDR400 (one stick, running at 333MHz)
- Pentium 4 641 / Abit AS8 / 1GB DDR400 (2x512MB Kingston HyperX)
- Athlon 64 3800+ / ECS K8V / 1GB DDR500 ( 2x512 Corsair running at 400MHz) - dual boots 98 and XP, 98 was installed first.
- Athlon 64 3400+ / MSI MS7142 / 1GB DDR400 (one stick)
- Dual Pentium III 1100MHz / MSI 694D Pro / 1GB SDR 133MHz (4x256MB) - dual boots 98 and XP, 98 was installed first.

None gave me any problems while installing win98se or running it with 1GB of ram. I haven't built any older machines with 1GB of ram and win98, or any newer machines. Also the one thing these have in common is that they all use VIA chipsets. I do recall having issues with running an intel i815t board with 1GB of ram under win98, but didn't pursue to investigate the issue further since the machine is a 1.4GHz tualatin and it doesn't really benefit from that much ram in my opinion.

If there is a hardware component here, I can say that using VIA chipsets on socket 370/socket A/socket 754 and 939 will work perfectly under win98se and 1GB of ram out of the box - same for intel i865 chipset boards, regardless of socket.

This would make for an interesting topic. As far as I know, the ram limit for win98se regardless of platform is 1GB. What machines have you had trouble with? I'd like to replicate the experience.

kanecvr wrote:

I do recall having issues with running an intel i815t board with 1GB of ram under win98

Isn't the Intel 815 chipset inherently limited to 512 MB already?

This would make for an interesting topic.

There's definitely no shortage of other discussion of the issue floating around on the Internet, and there have already been many topics even here. As I have already acknowledged, opinions on the severity of the problem vary widely. Even the page for Rob Loew's patch explicitly states that "Unmodified Windows 95, 98, 98SE or ME can malfunction or crash when more than 512MB of RAM is present".

I readily admit that I do not make a habit of installing Windows 98 SE on machines with lots of RAM and subjecting them to extensive testing. It is also worth noting that even if the machine boots and appears to run, then as suggested by the MSKB article, problems may only arise in specific situations, such as starting an MS-DOS session. I can at least confirm that my ASUS P4R800-VM with 2 GB would not boot in safe mode without producing an error message.

Jorpho wrote:

Isn't the Intel 815 chipset inherently limited to 512 MB already? […]
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kanecvr wrote:

I do recall having issues with running an intel i815t board with 1GB of ram under win98

Isn't the Intel 815 chipset inherently limited to 512 MB already?

This would make for an interesting topic.

There's definitely no shortage of other discussion of the issue floating around on the Internet, and there have already been many topics even here. As I have already acknowledged, opinions on the severity of the problem vary widely. Even the page for Rob Loew's patch explicitly states that "Unmodified Windows 95, 98, 98SE or ME can malfunction or crash when more than 512MB of RAM is present".

I readily admit that I do not make a habit of installing Windows 98 SE on machines with lots of RAM and subjecting them to extensive testing. It is also worth noting that even if the machine boots and appears to run, then as suggested by the MSKB article, problems may only arise in specific situations, such as starting an MS-DOS session. I can at least confirm that my ASUS P4R800-VM with 2 GB would not boot in safe mode without producing an error message.

I can't even get windows to install with 2GB of ram - it hangs on first boot saying "Insufficient memory to run windows". It installs with 1.5GB but hangs on first start after showing the desktop. Dos seems to work fine with 1GB of ram (dos 7.11) but I haven't tried to run dos games on that much memory. I do run dos games on my K6-3 rig witch has 256mb of ram and have experienced no problems.

Frankly the only reason for 1GB of ram under win98 si to run firefox 2.0 - the extra memory helps a lot.

Braca862 wrote:

It appears that these update patches seem to be the culprit for the problemWhen I installed either the autopatcher or the unofficial service packs, at first, everything works normal. However, after a few days, the computer freezes at bootup, either freezes at the splash screen or gives me a black screen with the blinking cursor. Here are my computer specs:

Can you expand on how you install these packs? Basically what options do you select?

Got the Same XPS T500 upgraded to 1Ghz CPU but with only 512MB and GF 4 4600 TI
Thing runs fine without any updates, funny thing is applying the shutdown fix's actually stops mine from shutting down.
Only "updates" are DX9, IE6, WMP9 and the updated windows installer, rest is stock standard Win98 SE

But yeh I would start again, and give it week or 2 and see if you really need the updates or not.
As it does make a real nice Dos/Win9x PC, even with the non ATX cnnector

To have a smooth experience in Win98SE for up to 1158MB (or 1.5GB if you're lucky) RAM just apply this tweak below, and NOTHING else! Don't mess up with the vcache in system.ini at all.
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/105373-vcache-fix-attempt/
You can also install HIMEMX if you want, but it's not necessary.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Braca862 wrote:

It appears that these update patches seem to be the culprit for the problemWhen I installed either the autopatcher or the unofficial service packs, at first, everything works normal. However, after a few days, the computer freezes at bootup, either freezes at the splash screen or gives me a black screen with the blinking cursor. Here are my computer specs:

Can you expand on how you install these packs? Basically what options do you select?

When installing the unofficial servic pack 2.1, I selected the official updates and the performance tweak, nothing else.

The Windows 2000 colour scheme is also nice, if you prefer the Windows 2000 or ME desktop "look".
This option hasn't given me any problems.