Is 64 mbs of RAM okay for win98?

This is related to my last thread in this Software section. It is titled "An Installation Question".

The problem with my brothers computer is probably a bad RAM stick. Now he only has 64 mbs of RAM instead of 128mbs. That's not enough to run WinXP. His computer requires old style RAM (hard for me to explain but Lostkiwi had a thread about it). The old style of pc 133 RAM is expensive and is not easily found, for me anyway.

pc 133 RAM you can buy in stores now isn't compatable with his computers motherboard. Something about double-sided, double-data RAM made nowadays can't be read by the motherboard. ?? oh, well. I hope you all know what I'm trying to say.

I've decided to format his hard drive and install win98 on his computer. I hope one stick of 64 is enough RAM to run win98.

What do you all think?

 

it will run it fine.. but may begin to slow down with the opening of many programs at one time.

 

Wow! That was fast!

Thanks Kodo.

 

I've had a similar problem with an older Asus board with an AMD processor. I think the MB was an Asus K7V with a 950Mhz processor. I couldn't run PC133 SD RAM in it, it had to be PC100 SD RAM. The older AMD processors ran a bus speed of 100Mhz and that board wouldn't clock the RAM down.

Just remember, with Win98, you can't run more than 1GB of RAM, the OS doesn't know what to do with it and will not boot.

As far as getting PC100 SD RAM, I'd try EBay. That's the world's garage sale. I'm sure you can find some there.

 

widows itself will run fine with 64mb but if you have applications that hog memory then you will have a problem.

the operating system can use up to 128mb for its resources
but you can install up to 512megs and windows will recognize it
and work with it properly

programs like games and applicatons like photoshop etc will hog your memory real fast leaving windows with very little to work with

you could go up to 700 megs and with a little tweaking get windows to work with it

over 1 gig and your operating system will freeze and not work properly

windows 98 was not designed to for gigs of memory

64 is good
128 is better
512 is excellent

 

I just got back from buying a 128 mb stick of pc 133 RAM.

I just couldn't live with myself if my brother had only 64 mbs. It sounds so small.

It cost way less than I thought it would. Only 50$. That's with taxes included. I thought it would be about 85$ for a stick of 128mb. My brother will pay for some of the cost too. So I didn't really spend 50$.

It better work in his computer though. The guys at the place where i bought it had no idea of what i was talking about when i tried explaining about the new and old pc 133 RAM. I still don't fully understand it myself, but I understand that newer pc 133 RAM will not work in some older motherboards.

I'm still probably going to format my brothers hard drive and install win98. He doesn't need winxp, really. All he does is play old NES and Atari emulators (oops, not supposed to talk about that ) and write a lot of word documents. Did I say a lot, I meant tons of word documents!

 

I purchased a 256 DDR stick of ram at office max the day after thanksgiving (had to wake up at 6 am just to wait in a half mile line to get into the store) and ended up getting the ram for FREE! (after rebates). How awesome is that?

 

I used to think my old 98 was the best with 64MB of RAM.
And then, i discovered this fourm.

 

I ran head on into the double sided/single sided RAM problem when upgrading my old Win98 rig from 128 to 256. Since it would only read 1/2 of the 128 MB stick of RAM I put into it, my RAM configuration was the ever popular 192MB (128+64=192) array. Looked funny on a spec sheet but what the heck, it worked okay