Win2k and XP can use well in excess of 256mb of ram (up to a terabyte or some ridiculously high number <g> ).
 
 
 
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Shrink
 
92% of the things we worry about don't happen - but the other 8% DO!
 
PIII 650@850
BE6-II Mobo with 320 mb ram
20 gig Quantum KX 8 gig Quantum CR
SBlive Value
All In Wonder Radeon 32MB
... and a bunch of USB Stuff
Windows 2000 Pro Retail

I have Whistler build 2428 and it uses my 512 megs quite well. Also think that win9x does benifit from more than 256 megs of ram cause then you can turn of virtual memory and you get much better performance. When i tryed to turn of virtual mem on 9x with 256 megs i got errors when i tried to run apps and **** but with 512 megs i turn it of and everything runs great! Get as much memory as you can it is cheap as dirt right now.
 
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My System
Dell Demension XPS T500
Triple Boot
Windows 2000 Pro 2195
Windows Whistler Pro 2428
Windows Millennium Final Retail
PIII @ 500 Mhz (with after market heatsink and dual fan)
512 Megs Ram
Guillemot Maxi Gammer Cougar (TNT2 M64 w/ 32 Megs of RAM)
Matrox Millennium PCI (w/ 4 Megs of RAM for second monitor)
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100 Ethernet Card
2 x Abit Hot Rod Pro ATA-100 RAID Controlers
2 x 12.6 Gig Maxtor Hard Disks RAID 0 (for system)
1 76.3 Gig Maxtor Hard Disk (for storage)
40X LG CD Rom Drive
100 Mb Iomega Internal Zip Drive
MS Explorer Mouse
MS Natural Keyboard Pro
And not a single piece of software that I actually own

Four&Twenty, I have never heard of anyone turning off virtual memory in Win 98!! It sucks as far as memory the way 98 handles RAM, I didn't know it would run like that. Do you just run apps, or do you run games too?? I wouldn't even try to turn off VM when trying to play Giants at 1024X768X32.
 
The reason I asked this ?? is, I have a friend that has almost the exact same system as I do & he has 512Mb of PC 133 & I have 256 & I can't tell that his system is any faster at all. He copied my system exactly except for the amout of RAM & the case.
 
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Athlon 700 @ 698
Epox 7kxa
256Mb PC133
Hercules Prophet 32Mb DDR
Sound Blaster X-Gamer
Pioneer 16x DVD
HP 9100i CD-RW
2-30gig 7200RPM WD HD
ViewSonic PF790 19"
Win98SE
Full Tower

Personally I'm not convinced turning off VM in Win9x is going to do anything but make your system run like a dog.
Win9x has such terrible memory management, no matter how much physical RAM you throw at it, it leaks it all away.
Hay, if you say it makes a difference then I gotta believe you, it's not something I've tried - just not convinced.

Hey I use winme to play games with nothing installed but games all the updates and the various detonator drivers ( i am always switching them) i have 512 megs of ram i have vm turned off it works exceptionally well. Also contrary to what i heard and you guys think my system did get a noticeable boost when i upgraded from 256 to 512 and turned off vm. I figure it is only logical to have as little vm as possible considering the fact that i never use up all my ram. I have the page file set to 5 megs in win2k and totally disabled in whistler. Every thing runs great. I say ditch the paging file if you have the physical mem to run the system. The only reason that the vm started was because ram was too expensive to have enough to run the cool new programs and sh1t and hard disks were, and still are, cheaper. But now ram is cheap as dirt and vm is only slowing you down.

When I'm running WinXP on a new DDR mobo w/ 512Mb of DDR RAM I might try it, but until then, I have my second HD for my page file.
 
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Athlon 700 @ 698
Epox 7kxa
256Mb PC133
Hercules Prophet 32Mb DDR
Sound Blaster X-Gamer
Pioneer 16x DVD
HP 9100i CD-RW
2-30gig 7200RPM WD HD
ViewSonic PF790 19"
Win98SE
Full Tower

Alec I know that you know your sh1t and all but I really have to disagree with you on this one. I never use up all my ram, never! So I don't need the paging file. I run plenty of appz and do alot of multitasking and I never have any problems with running out of memory. It really comes down to configuring your system for what you need it to do. I have 512 megs I don't use it all I don't need a paging file simple as that.

OK AlecStaar, I give up, where in speed disk can you move your swap file to the edge of the disk?
 
I have never heard of that configuration of SCSI drives Alec, it sounds fast as hell, but it also sounds like a delicate balance.

For swapfiles, I think that the old 2.5x physical RAM rule is less relevant today than it was when we had very little physical RAM.
 
The rule only made sense because you needed all you could possibly get, and 2.5x physical RAM was all that the system would use. Once you get enough physical RAM that you're not maxing out both it AND the swapfile, it no longer makes sense to make the swapfile as large as it can possibly get.
 
The way to arrive at optimal size is to set it ridiculously large, run EVERYTHING that you could *POSSIBLY* do (WORST CASE) at one time (including image manipulation, for you Photoshop guys), see what the total committed memory is (using the task manager or a performance profiler), figure out how much is above and beyond physical RAM, add some reasonable safety margin (maybe 32 or 64 MB), and set the swapfile to that size.
 
If you are still within a reasonable safety margin of physical RAM even after all of that, you can safely turn off the swapfile. The idea of a swapfile is to cover the physical RAM shortage that you might have. Once you get beyond a certain amount of physical RAM, swapfile is less important. To imagine that these guys with 512MB of RAM should need a 1.28GB swapfile is ludicrous.

well put

Actually it is Win386.swp since I am using Win98SE. Thanks, I will test it see if it performes any better. I use Norton System Works 2000 & it is in there too. Thanks again for your help.
 
Lol, QwertyJuan