Hack #35. Manage Windows System Resources
Windows System Resources have been misunderstood and maligned for years. There isn't much you can do about them but change your software.
Many "out of memory" errors, specifically "out of resources" or "low on resources" error messages, on Windows 95, 98, and Me have nothing to do with how much RAM is installed in the system but how well specific portions of it are managed. The specific portions of RAM I'm discussing here are the system resources. Why Microsoft allows Windows to issue the same "out of memory" error for low resources that it issues for actually having too little system memory to run a program is anyone's guess; they know better and so do we.
System resources are (poorly documented) bits of memory that Windows 95, 98, and Me play with internally. They comprise three fixed-size 64 KB blocks of RAM known as the GDI, User, and System resources, each used for a specific purpose within the operating system. The GDI (Graphical Device Interface) is used for communicating graphical device instructions and is not usually implicated in "out of memory" or "out of resources" error conditions. System resources are rarely implicated in these conditions, as Windows manages this block pretty well for itself. User resources, on the other hand, really are not under user control but used at the whim of applications that PC users use.
Each resource in Windows 95/98/Me is limited in size as well as in the number of processes or blocks of each ...