When Adding Memory Yields Out Of Memory

By Neil J. Rubenking

My system runs Windows 98 SE. I had 512MB of memory but increased to 1GB because of dropping memory prices. But my system constantly displays messages saying that the system is running out of memory or doesn’t have enough memory to run certain programs. This never happened before I upgraded!

John S. Bryan

Windows 9x (95, 98, and Me) is not designed to support that much memory—at least not in its default configuration. At start-up, it reserves space for a memory cache called Vcache, whose size is proportional to the amount of memory on the system. This space is drawn from a memory area called the system arena, which is used by Windows internally for other purposes. When the amount of memory is much larger than 512MB, the Vcache can consume all or most of the system arena, causing Windows to report insufficient memory.

The solution is to put a lid on the amount of memory allocated to the Vcache. Open the file C:\Windows\System.ini in Notepad and find the section header [vcache]. Look within this section for a line beginning MaxFileCache=. If you don’t see this line before the next section header (the next line of text in square brackets), insert a MaxFileCache= line just after the [vcache] header. You need to set it to 512MB, but the values are expressed in kilobytes, so the correct number is 512 multiplied by 1,024, or 524,288. Edit the line so it reads MaxFilecache=524288, save the System.ini file, and restart your system.