Julian wrote:
> I understood and would like someone to confirm that
> the Windows resource meter had nothing to do with
> how much RAM you had, it was only a measure of
> usage of some stack or similar.
You may be thinking of the GDI, USER and SYSTEM resources. I think in Win98
each of these is a 64K block of memory. If any of them gets completely
used up, your computer may run extremely slowly or crash. Different programs
use different amounts of the various resources - for instance a really long
and complicated web page can use them up completely; it's the only thing
I've seen do it. Running a lot of programs concurrently will use up a lot
of system resources.
Having said all that I don't believe that the "resources" which were referred
to in the Technet note I referred to were connected with the system resources
I have described above, but I'd have to re-read the article in more detail.
The main problem is the annoying habit of the Win9x file management system
grabbing all "spare" memory for file cache.
> When I increased my RAM I didn't notice any change, and I still
> regularly run out of resources because I seem to run some
> programmes that are heavy on resources (Eudora and Info Select)
> and because windows is just hopeless at managing resources, and
> because IE5 gets confused and refuses to release, until there
> are no more left. I have to reboot regularly just to regain resources.
I've never had this problem with Win98SE, but then I don't use Eudora or
Info Select. The only program I use which noticeably mucks up available
memory and/or resources is Vuescan.
> I'd also like to know if it is true as Tony suggests that
> over 512MB or RAM is a waste, as I was thinking of getting
> more RAM on the weekend.
As has been suggested elsewhere, you could give it a try. With RAM as cheap
as AUD$80 for 256MB why not? On the other hand I'm reasonably sure the main
bottleneck in my PC when dealing with large scans is the 5400RPM IDE drive.
A 7200RPM drive would speed up loading and saving files by at least 25%.
Two 7200rpm drives in a RAID array should be significantly better still.
Loading and saving files is the no.1 timewaster for me when working with
film scans on my PC.
Rob
Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
