Q: I have been told that Windows 98 Second Edition is unable to handle 512MB of RAM, is this true?
The computer I have now has 256MB RAM, but there is room for another 256, so physically I could put more in, but if Windows can't handle it there is no benefit. I've tried finding the answer on the net with no luck.
Please help.
A: Technically, that is false, but practically speaking, it's basically true. To quote from The Software Corner article noted below,
"...There is a limit on what is enough RAM on the Win9x core OSes (win95,win98,winME) and that is 512MB. There have been a lot of benchmarks out there with computers that have 512MB and more and the results show that computer performance suffers since there is so much RAM that it takes the CPU longer to find the data."
Thus, while there is nothing that will cause the PC to fail, it won't really benefit much (and actually slows some things down a bit). In short, the cost vs. benefit ratio falls off rather dramatically above 128MB of RAM. Here's a chart that show the limited benefits of going from 128 to 256MB.
http://www.rammatters.com/proof/graph_doubortrip.html
Additionally, there are a couple of issues that might be termed Windows 9x architectural flaws:
These issues can actually slow down some functions of the operating system if more than 64MB of memory is installed. It isn't a dramatic slowdown, of course, and I heartily recommend having at least 96MB of RAM on any Pentium II or better system these days, but it is clear that you will derive little benefit from 512MB or more RAM in Win98SE. In fact, most techies consider the "peak benefit" amount of RAM to be a mere 96MB in Win98 -- Win 95 cost/performance benefits peak at 64MB.
To really take advantage of more than 128MB of RAM, you should consider moving to a more advanced OS such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP (etc.)
For Further Reading
See http://www.geek.com/procspec/chipsets/s7intel.htm and http://www.thesoftwarecorner.com/ram.html for more details.
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