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A big box shop is advertising an 80GB external hard drive for $89. I have an older system maybe ten years. Genuinelntel(r)
Celeron(tm) processor 2.94 GB 160 RAM 322 MB available space. I have installed a CD burner and a USB card to accomodate a newer printer.Can this old system support an external hard drive? My current system is slow and sticky with a lot of lockups etc. Owning a digital camera requires more room. Is this an option I should be getting involved in ?? Thanks for your advice
"My current system is slow and sticky with a lot of lockups etc."
I don't think adding an external drive will help with that problem. Checking for malware would probably be a good idea. Adding more RAM might help.
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I also doubt slow/sticky/lockups are HD size related unless you've got right down to about the last Gig.
DerekW
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I run Adaware and spybot daily. My free space
averages 250 to 300 MB. A few years ago I increased RAM from 64 to 160 but I think I read on here a while back that W98SE can only handle max 130 MB ??? Thanks for your replies Vic
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If you are down to only 250 - 300 MB of HD free space then I agree that this could cause problems if programs and virtual memory temporarily attempt to use/fill it. Mostly HD space is not an issue but in your case it could be.
W98SE is fine up to 512M RAM. It can go higher than this (and still use the extra RAM) if you limit VCACHE to 512M or less in system.ini.
DerekW
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You don't normally need to worry unless you are going over 512M RAM. In which case you have to put an entry in the system.ini file.
It's easier for me if I assume you know nothing, so please don't feel insulted if I state the obvious.
When you cache something you store it on the HD, so that you can go back to it fast without keeping it in RAM (which can obviously be used for better things). An example is when you are browsing websites. You will have noticed that when you go back to a page it pops up immediately, even when you are offline. This is because it has been cached to the HD.
Without boring you with the technicalities, way back in the early/mid 90's MS didn't allow for "gigantic" RAM's above 512M. Because of this, if you stuff in, say, 1G of RAM the system gets totally confused. It either won't boot or comes up with the craziest of error messages "out of memory".
You can get around this (still using all of your 1G of RAM) by limiting the cache to 512M or less). There is a kinda trade off here. It is pointless restricting cache unnecessarily but 512M is wadges. The golden rule is to set your cache to 512M or less (preferably before you add the new RAM).
You do this in the system.ini file. If you type system.ini in the Run box, just over half way down you will see a heading like this:
[vcache]
Unless there has been some tweaking going on it will be empty (ie. there will be nothing underneath it). You pop your entry directly under this heading in "kilobytes" rather than "megabytes". Now to add to the confusion, in the real world kilo = 1000 but in computers the conversion is 1024. So to get from M to k you multiply M by 1024.
It follows therefore that if you want to set it to exactly 512M you enter 524288 (512 x 1024) and it has to look like this:
[vcache]
MaxFileCache=524288It is usual to have one line feed above and below this lot as a separator.
On my machine I have set this to 75% of 512M (I won't bore you with the reasons). So 75% of 512M = 384M and converted to kilobytes my entry looks like this:
[vcache]
MaxFileCache=393216All very precise, but just remember the golden rule I mentioned earlier. That is all that really matters.
Hope this helps.
DerekW
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Thank you for taking the time Derek. I will study what you have outlined and take it from there. Much obliged Vic
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