Scott Hill wrote:

>     9x uses full 32-bit addressing so the limit is a full 4Gb.

Yes. And it also could theoretically keep running for months, but bad
implementations cripled Win95 & Win98 to die at 49.7 days. That one bug has
finally been fixed, but there are many such.

Earlier Win98 systems had problems with more than 96 MB RAM.

My PIII is listed as being able to take a max of 384 MB.

> > : i've also heard that the bios on the motherboard can be
> > : a limiting factor.
> >
>
>     Usually only in how many slots of what sort and what max SIMM/DIMM size
> they support.

Yup. That's a key factor.


> >   I think there was a limit in some motherboards on how much memory they
> > will cache (memory above that limit can be read but it's not cached). I
> don't
> > know if it's any issue nowadays.
> >

IIRC, that's where the Win9X problems with 96MB came in.



>     Of course, 2k has far superior memory handling - I'd look up the details
> but I don't have the relevant documentation installed currently...

Of course, it really depends on what his needs are. For home use, Win2K is
usually not a good solution. Of course, it is a little more stable, and is good
for developers.

Especially if he just needs a good POV-Ray render box, then running Linux
instead is probably a good alternative. Probably since RedHat 5.2, and
definitely since 6.0 and 7.0, it's gotten easier to install than Win9x on a new
machine. And a custom compile on Linux of POV-Ray usually zipps along quite
nicely, and it has none of the major performance issues of the Win9X series of
OS's, and it's not nearly as much of a memory hog as 2K.

As long as the apps he needs for Linux, it'd be worth looking into.


--
Jon A. Cruz
http://www.geocities.com/joncruz/action.html

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