i have a Win98 / XP dual boot machine. i just upgrated my motherboard, cpu, and memory to a Gigabyte motherboard with a 1.6 Athlon with 1GB of DDR memory. now my windows 98 boot partition will start to boot, but then it will freeze in a psychdelic color patter in the Win98 splash screen. i've heard that Win98 can freak with too much memory. i've tried reinstalling windows over the top of itself. tried removing the video card drivers (Geforce4 MX420). any ideas?

Run MSCONFIG, click "advanced" and limit memory to 512 Mb or less. If that helps, you can physically remove a memory stick.

Check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q253912

Check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.ASP Don't be put off by the title. Hope you boot up in safe more.

Without reading the two articles mentioned above (I'm lazy), there are 2 potential issues with win98 and 1gb ram. Above 512MB you have to limit vcache to below 512MB.(mine is 64MB) At 1 GB you may have problems with windows loading, saying not enough memory. Microsofts solution is to limit memory to 768MB with this line in system.ini (or use msconfig)... MaxPhysPage=30000. (there is another problem with 1.5GB where microsoft suggest limiting ram to 1GB) I struck this problem but found I could boot to windows with 1GB ram by taking out the device=C:\emm386.exe line from config.sys. Different options (noems, ram) for this memory manager determined how much ram i could specify and get win98 to boot. This is some sort of address space problem (I am now speaking beyond my level of understanding)and that your AGP aperture size can also have an effect on how much ram you can successfully boot with. I have a large ram disk on this system (400MB using xmsdsk)) which may have a bearing as my games system (no ramdisk)runs with 1GB ram without problem.

awesome! thanks for your help. took out a stick and it started right up (duhh, me). i'll see if i can get the other methods to work (so i don't have to keep pulling half the memory out). you guys are all THE BOMB!