PC Hacks

Hack #32. Install the RAM Your Operating System Needs

Understand how your operating system and applications use RAM to solve memory dilemmas.

With today's operating systems and applications, the more RAM you can feed them, the better. Yes, Windows 95 only required 4 MB of RAM while Microsoft recommended 8, but trying to run Windows 95 on a system with less than 32 MB of RAM is definitely frustrating. The memory requirements for all versions of Windows are listed in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1. Windows operating system memory requirements and recommendations

Operating system	Minimum amount of memory required	Amount of memory Microsoft recommends	Practical recommendation
Windows 95	4 MB	8 MB	32 MB
Windows NT	64 MB	128 MB	128-256 MB
Windows 98/98SE	16 MB	24 MB	32-64 MB
Windows Me	32 MB	> 32 MB	64-128 MB
Windows XP	64 MB	128 MB	256-512 MB
Windows 2000	128 MB	256 MB	256-512 MB
Windows 2003	128 MB	256 MB	512-1,024 MB

Windows 98 was rumored to go into a memory-addressing performance frenzy with over 128 MB of installed RAM, but after much research this appears to be myth rather than truth. There is, however, a certain truth out there that may have implicated Windows by coincidence.

I've been exposed to several different system board chipsets as well as a variety of CPU choices from AMD, Cyrix, and Intel. It is evident from the sampling of chipset data in Table 4-2 that mass use of these chipsets in PC hardware was coincident with the era of Windows 9x (1995-2000). Keep in mind that these caching limitations in hardware ...