"BillW50" wrote in :

You are running W98 with SATA drives? How do you get that too work? And
what good is 512MB or even 1GB of RAM for a W98 machine? Sure I have
added more RAM than 64MB to a W98 machine before. But I never saw any
advantages to using more.


Rudolph Loew managed to make 4GB work, but natively it doesn't need so much.
I have 1 GB in my boards, and I use some of it for a RAM disk to put a swap
file on. That sounds REALLY perverse, but it works very well because as far
as the OS is concerned it thinks everything is optimally configured, and I
get all the speed that RAM can give me, and no disk thrashing. I can shut
disk motors down at will (on a solar powered system) and know that unless I
use the machine, the OS will not keep forcing them to start up again, so I
save power and get long disk life.

No advantages to more than 64 MB? Curious. I'd set between 256MB and 512 MB
as standard, based on seeing how large audio files and programs handle when
they have it.

I use a small tool called RAMpageto monitor RAM use. It also recovers RAM if
too much is used, but I set it to do that very gently. it rarely does it now
I have more than 256 MB. Currently there is more than 570MB free, and 200MB
of swap usage, so my best (simplest correct) move there is to increase the
RAM disk size.

About SATA, I try to avoid it, but there are very small and cheap adapters
that will connect to EIDE and let SATA plug to the adapter. I bought a couple
in case of need, but they're still unused except for testing.