If you have to have more than 64 meg ram on such a board for Photoshop or
Pagemaker, etc, go into cmos and disable external cache.  I would do this
without testing to see if the board is stable after installing the ram
upgrade, since the annoying little program crashes associated with installed
ram exceeding the board's ability to cache sometimes corrupt the windows
registry, which can be difficult to recover. If the extra ram is really
necessary, then the modest performance penalty of having no external cache
is a non-issue.  IF you had a VIA chipset motherboard, you won't have this
problem.  I don't really believe any board design would cache 'some' of your
ram (the first 64meg).  In my experience, all your installed ram was
successfully cached, or the board became unstable when more than 64meg was
present and external cache was enabled. If your willing to reload windows
from scratch, you can test your system's stability by installing the ram,
loading windows and clicking around in control panel or explorer.  It will
crash pretty quickly, although not fatally at first, if the board is
unstable.  Repeated crashes will bring up the blue screen fatal errors.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Herbert Graf [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 10:18 AM

>> Would inserting this MaxFileCache line allow an older Socket 7
>> system to use 128 MB of RAM?  (Gateway 233 MHz Pentium MMX machine with
Gateway
>> OEM Intel 430TX mainboard).
>> I long ago read that this system could only effectively utilize 64 MB of
>> RAM.  Is this just an old wive's tale?

>     No, that is a completely different problem. Most Socket 7 Intel
>chipsets (the HX being the only one that doesn't necessarily have this
>limitation, it depends on what TAG SRAM chip you have) L2 cache up to the
>first 64MB or memory. You CAN add more, however only the first 64MB is
>cached. This may or not be much of an issue for you depending on what OS
you
>use. The highest performance hit is with the Win9x (and WinME) operating
>systems since they like to put stuff in the upper end of the memory range.
>TTYL

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