23 Nov
2012
23 Nov
'12
11:32 a.m.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2012 6:57 AM
Ah, apparently *all* the Win9x codebase struggles with
approaching a
gig.
For some of them, you can't /install/ with more
than a certain amount,
but once it's running you can put the extra RAM back in.
Not just the 9x systems.
Back when I was doing systems administration at XKL, I brought in a new
Dell server (dual Pentium 3 Xeons, 4GB RAM in 1 card, you know, little
box for 1997 :-) running NT 4.0 Terminal Server. As I was adding
engineering applications to the base install, a DLL got overwritten, the
box crashed, and I had to re-install from the ground up--beginning about
19:00 on a Friday night.
Long story short, I was on the phone to Round Rock from about 21:00 till
06:00 the next morning, struggling with the install, which would die at
the point where the system re-boots to run from the disk instead of the
CD. Turned out that the install version could not run in more than 1GB.
After the shift change at Dell, the new guy on the phone said he thought
there was a BIOS setting which would handle the issue, rather than my
having to have a 1GB card FedEx'd for Monday morning. Yup, the BIOS
indeed had a setting which was named roughly "Pretend I have only 256MB
in this box".
Gack.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/