System Resource Problem

[patrickrunscare]

I'm not sure if anyone on here will be able to help me, as I've scoured the Internet in search for a solution to this problem, but I'll give it a shot.

Here's the situation...

I've got a box running 98se fully upgraded with all of the patches, ect. It has 128mb RAM and a 13.6gb hard drive that ends up being 12.7 after formatting.

I've got the minimum starting up. Only device drivers, system programs... but no real applications, minus an Adobe Gamma Loader (but this problem was happening previous to this inclusion into my startup folder).

The problem is this, the computer frequently runs out of system resources. One large program (say Photoshop, or Dreamweaver) will completely kill it. I get the Windows warnings and the whole nine yards. Even when I close the programs I do not regain much if any of the system resources.

Now I know that 98 is horrible with memory.. leaks.. ect. But why should it run out of resources so quickly?

And here's the stumper... I had a Win98se box fully upgraded with only 80mb of RAM, and it would rarely, if ever run out of system resources. Granted, it would get slow and then it was time for a restart, but I never actually would get the Windows system warnings, and if I'd close my programs, I could usually get back up to about where I started after a fresh boot.

The only difference between the two setups, other than the RAM of course, is that the latter only had a 2 gig drive. Both are formatted as FAT32.

So, I guess my question is this: would having a larger hard drive be responsible for the system resource issue? It's the only difference in the two configurations.

I've been considering repartitioning the drive into smaller pieces, but I'm reluctant because I don't want to either A. lose data, or B. have to reinstall everything.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[spikemerlin]

im not sure about whats wrong but maybe its not the hard drive it is the ram (maybe windows 98 cant handle too much).

of course did you try looking at what windows is using as a pageing file, i think you can see it from one of the control panel tools

[renegade600]

system resources is very inconsistant. see this link (http://www.apptools.com/rants/resources.php) for more info on what it is.

you cannot compare two similar computers unless they are exactly the same. The best thing to do is to make sure you only startup what is needed. Reboot more often.

[patrickrunscare]

I've played with the pagefile, and that really makes no difference because system resources are fixed in 9x/ME... there's no changing that. The RAM is not the issue. I'm just wondering if drive size affects system resource usage?

[SEUser]

Hi, Partition changes, swap file, RAM size have nothing to do with resources in
Win98SE. Unlike later versions of Windows, a fixed 640 kilobytes are allocated
to system resources - file stacks, high memory allocation etc
You may have read that Win98SE does not need the file config.sys on the
root drive. That is basically true but then you lose the ability to allocate
and define these 640 kilobytes.
If you have removed config.sys or want to tune it, try the one I have ...

; Skip 2 seconds boot delay [/F] + load part of IO.SYS high [/E:xxx] SWITCHES line:
; SWITCHES=/F /E
; Load DOS HIGH + enable DOS UMA (Upper Memory Area):
DOS=HIGH,UMB,AUTO
; HIMEM.SYS v3.95 HIGH + Extended MEMory Manager [MANDATORY for Windows 9x!]:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS /NUMHANDLES=128 /TESTMEM:OFF /Q
; Optimal BUFFERS line when using SMARTDRV:
BUFFERS=11,0
; Optimal FILES line:
FILES=80
; My LASTDRIVE line:
LASTDRIVE=Z
; Enable MS-DOS support for Windows 32-bit Disk Access [MANDATORY for Windows 9x/ME!]:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\Windows\IFSHLP.SYS
; Increased COMMAND environment SHELL line:
SHELL=C:\Windows\COMMAND.COM C:\ /E:1280 /L:160 /U:160 /P /F
STACKS=0,0
FCBS=1,0
Set path=c:\Windows\command.exe