I was just purchasing a new PC and configured it with 1 GB RAM (I do a lot of 3D rendering). I wanted to stick with 98/ME, but the PC vendor told me that 98 & ME don’t work with over 512 MB RAM. I checked a couple other vendors and was told basically the same thing… they wouldn’t confugre above 384 MB.
That sounded odd to me, so I did a little digging around on my own. Microsoft’s KnowledgeBase had an article talking about problems with over 1.5 GB that mentioned a setting that would tell Windows to only use 1 GB of RAM, and another article talked about vCache having a max size of 800 MB, so it seems like Windows 98 & ME SHOULD be able to handle 1 GB RAM (there was also a Win95 article stating that it had a 4GB address space but would only recognize 2 GB… it would seem odd that Win98 would take that down to 512 MB, PLUS I saw something stating that Microsoft said Win98 wouldn’t work with MORE than 1 GB of RAM).
So, my question is: what’s the straight scoop on RAM and Windows98/ME? Does anyone know if there is anything special that needs to be done to get Windows to properly use the full 1 GB?
(as a side note, apparently the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 card that the computer had was freezing when playing WAV files and my vendor was claiming THAT was related to the memory issue).
