Yesterday I planned to clear up, wash the car and a number of other little things.

Well, I managed a little bit of the first thing but none of the latter due to being phoned up at 2:30 by Rob Newson. He continued to talk to me about Linuxy and BSDy things for 3 hours, by which time it was time for Time Team on the telly and it was getting dark outside.

What I did manage to do was fit the memory I’d got replaced the day before in my games PC. After a few hours trying to sort out why Windows 98SE was having problems I found the answer on the web.. Once the system memory (including any memory on AGP cards) goes above 512MB the calculated size of the system’s disk cache becomes bigger than the main memory, so you get the system crashing out with out of memory errors! The fix is to set a specific size in the system.ini file (after first removing memory so you can actually boot the machine).

Well, the machine is now fully working and runs far more quickly than it did before even though the speed of the porcessor hasn’t changed. This would be partly due tot eh faster memory and partly due to the faster hard disk with an 8MB onboard cache. Windows is really quite disk bound, especially when booting.

Oh, there is one thing.. Windows’ scandisk and defrag can’t handle 80GB hard disks.. they just stop working giving an out of memory error. Strangely, the DOS scandisk doesn’t have this problem. Hmm.