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Running Windows 98 & RAM not recovered

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by tholt

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My PC is running Windows 98 on a Compaq 400 mhz 64 meg RAM machine. Presently after being rebooted, I have 72% memory available. After surfing the web or running games or other applications, the available memory will decress. After awhile I will go below 50%. This will never recover unless I reboot, which seems to be often since surfing the web starts having problems. I can increase memory, but is there anything I can do to recover memory except for rebooting.

10 replies

by kuhlio

There are a couple of things you can do to try and get some of your memory back. You must keep in mind though that Win9x is poor at memory management. One thing you can do to save resources is not run Active Desktop, have no background, that sort of thing. Another is to get rid of all the processes your PC may be running. Open the task manager and close everything you don't need. Hope that helps.

by kuhlio

One other thing you might want to check is to run the command MSCONFIG That will show you all of the programs that start up when your PC first boots, and you can choose to stop any of those as well.

by dclanton

Hello---

A possible solution would be to go to click on start, go to run, and then type msconfig and press ok.

After that a box will appear, you need to then click the startup tab, and remove any programs taht you dont want to start up each time your computer boots. Please be aware that if you are not experienced I dont recommend this option. If you cant do that, then you need to add more memory to your machine, 64mg isnt much memory, the reason your computer is low om memory is becauseyou are running to many things @ once, with not enough memroy~! Try that and see if that helps you!

---goodbye----

by thechas

It sounds like you have a memory leak.
Perhaps a piece of add ware. or spy ware.

Try LavasoftUSa's adaware to search for and remove adware.

To check for memory leaks, you need a utility like memturbo, or freememt. You can download them from your favorite freeware site.
I like www.nonags.com

64MB is low in my opinion for W98. I prefer 128 - 196MB.

Also, how full is your hard drive?
Clean out your Windows\temp and internet cache folders.
Scandisk, and defrag your drive.

by bv2

download a memory management utility - analogx's maxmem is a nice little utility that will free up available ram. On another note, if you only have 72% system resources available on a fresh start, you should consider cleaning out some of the items in your startup - I shoot for 90-94% system resources free on startup. You can take these items out by running msconfig.

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