98SE and hardware upgrades

[AlanMiller]

I'm about to upgrade my box, but want to stick with running 98SE. I'm hoping to get some information on a few issues:

o Biggest harddrive that 98 will not have trouble with. I have heard, for instance, that FDISK is not able to recognize more than 60GB, so this would maybe limit the size in terms of partitioning it.

o Max memory 98 will be able to 1) See 2) Use. I've read all kinds of stuff on this issue, but have never found a definitive answer. I've seen a suggestion of using 512MB, with half of it as a ramdrive for the swapfile. Any comments on this idea?

o Using two parallel ports (one for scanner, one for printer). I'm hoping to use this as a way to circumvent the conficts I get with the piggybacked configuration.

The possible candidate is AMD XP 2.0GHz with 256MB DDR RAM 333MHz. I don't know much about video cards (either) but 64MB sounds enough to me. Would it be worth upping it?

thanks for any info

Alan

[WyllyWylly]

<UL><LI>Hard drive: limited by your system BIOS, for the most part. But you are correct, FDISK has a limitation of 64GB. It will not recognize drives larger than that size. More information is available directly from Microsoft (including a fix) in article 263044. If you use partitions greater than around 32GB in size, a great deal of slack (wasted space) is created by the FAT32 file system, so for practical use and to maximize your drive's utilization, stick to that barrier.
<LI>Max memory: 512MB is your ceiling in Windows 98. Due to its design it cannot efficiently address memory in excess of 512MB, but it will still fly with that amount of RAM, as the system's resource requirements are far lower than Windows 2000/XP. This is documented in article 235912.
<LI>Parallel ports: You should not have problems with more than one parallel port. Just watch your resources; if the BIOS supports it you should be fine.
<LI>Video card memory: 64MB on your video card should be plenty, even if you are gaming. The extra video memory would only be useful if you were planning to do graphic or video editing and even then you would do well to consider using Windows 2000 or XP and more system, not video, memory.[/list]HTH,

[AlanMiller]

Thanks for all that info, Mark.
In the second article you cited, it appears that there are potential problems with AGP video adapters. Specifically:

" "Out of Memory" Error Messages with Large Amounts of RAM Installed
This problem may occur more readily with Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) video adapters because the AGP aperture is also mapped to addresses in the system arena. For example, if Vcache is using a maximum cache size of 800 MB and an AGP video adapter has a 128-MB aperture mapped, there is very little address space remaining for the other system code and data that must occupy this range of virtual addresses."

Just my luck that the upgrade I'm looking at includes AGP 8x.
Should I try for a different video adaptor if the choice is available?

Alan

[WyllyWylly]

Only if you exceed 512MB system RAM, otherwise what was stated in that article will not affect you. <img src=/S/smile.gif border=0 alt=smile width=15 height=15>

[chrisgreaves]

> FDISK has a limitation of 64GB. It will not recognize drives larger than that size.

Thank you. My twin 80Gs are now up and running and I'm breathing again.

Thank you even more: I hadn't realised that one could FDISK from a DOS window while Win98 was running. That has saved me many, many re-boots.