Windows 98SE tweaks

[cobra1]

Not sure if I'm in the right forum so bear with me. I have an old Compaq Presario 4540 with Windows 98SE, 266 Mhz, 32 MB of RAM, 3 GB hard drive. As you can imagine it is no speed demon. I have done all the usual tweaks for 98SE that are on the net with marginal improvements and downloaded a program called Cacheman which helped somewhat. At one time or another I have used (and discarded) just about every type of Ram Booster out there, mostly with dismal results.

A couple of days ago I ran across another article on 98SE tweaks concerning virtual memory. It said I should manage my own settings and that three times RAM was a good setting so I set the minimum and maximum to 100 MB. So far so good. It was a considerable improvement so I tried that for a while and then I thought let's change the settings to 500 MB for minimum and maximum. Well you could have bowled me over, this thing is now much faster than it has a right to be, startup was quite fast, hard drive activity is not a problem and it defrags unbelievably fast.

Second day at that setting and still no problems but I'm certainly no expert (mostly self taught). My concerns are is there a point to how high you can set this virtual memory and what are the concerns if I set it too high. Will this affect the computer in the long run? I mostly use the computer for surfing the net, e-mail, chat, and I belong to several forums non computer related.

 

[r53s]

If you have a 3 GB hard drive, let it as it is...

 

[setishock]

Ram...

I build these things all day long and have found you can expand the memory to at least 384 megs. Trouble is the fsb is 66mhz so the memory is pc66. The light at the end of the tunnel is you can add pc100 and it will run it at pc66. You have to follow the single and double density rules here. Being that old the ram is most likely single density.
Now as for the page file the general rule of thumb is 1.5 times the physical memory. In win98se with a drive that small it's best to let windows handle the pagefile. If you can get your hands on a 10 or 20 gig drive from that era it will slide right in. I have been experimenting with an 80 gig on my p2 and it runs just fine with no extra drivers or bios adjustments.

 

[lurkswithin]

In a true DOS environment as 98SE let windows management run the page file(virtual memeory). Just as Seti said. You will have less trouble in the long run.

 

[cobra1]

In a true DOS environment as 98SE let windows management run the page file(virtual memeory). Just as Seti said. You will have less trouble in the long run.

That's what I was trying to find out, will there be any ill effects to the computer by adjusting your own virtual memory settings, especially that high. The only ill effect I've had so far is that I have less hard drive available but I still have enough for what I use. Can it mess up the OS or anything else?

 

[setishock]

no...

In a nut shell no. But having to go to the page file so often will slow down the system. If for exsample you have the drive do a read/write operation and the system was in the process of shoving out to or getting something from the page file, the rest of the system has to wait for it to finish the process before it can continue. Hence getting the ram to a higher amount will cut down on how often the os has to go to the pagefile. The pagefile is not and never was intended to replace ram. It is by compareson slower than the slowest ram. it is intended to be a place where a program can deposit a data file or an unused module untill it is needed or called for in simple terms.