I run into this problem as well. Win95,GatewayP5-166XL,2 yrs old.Originally
16MB RAM.
Netscape 4.04. I just added 64MB RAM to bring it to 80MB. I press shift key
on startup to prevent PCCillin95, & Cleansweep from loading, but I let
FirstAid98Deluxe crash protector
run in the background.
I frequently have to unfreeze with FirstAid98. It works the first time
about 80% of the time, but if it continues to freeze up a second or third
time the success rate drops quickly to zero. Then I have to press reset to
reboot.
I was hoping the extra RAM would have helped more than it has. Maybe I did
not install correctly? Anyone have a freeware program to download that will
check if the extra 64MB is working? My startup screen still shows 16MB of
RAM, but the tech service at Crucial told
me the BIOS does not update, I would have to reload windows again for the
BIOS to see the extra 64MB.
I have 500MB free space on my 2 GIG hard drive and I let Windows set the
Swap file.
I tried previous suggestions listed here on setting swap manually with the
min=max at 100MB, but it did not seem to help prevent freezeups. I went
back to letting Windows manage the swap with min=0. I had assumed that at
80MB RAM, swap would not be accessed frequently.
Or could the hard disk be running for some other reason?
I last reloaded all of my software in Oct 97. (after screwing up my system
with an unsuccessfull
partitioning attempt with Partition Magic to free up space, it was my error
& I have no
backup system) It was very fast right after formatting & reloading win95,
but as I filled the drive with all the PCCillin, First Aid, & Quarterdeck
Cleansweep software, it got too slow running these in the background.
And if I load other software and only leave 100MB of free space on the
harddrive its even worse. So I try & leave 500MB out of the 2 GIG by using
Cleansweep to unload software
that I do not use frequently.
As per another suggestion I read about on this list, I use the freeware
Cacheman 1.0(c)
to set the optimal disk cache size for 64 MB RAM, minimal 2048KB & maximal
10240KB.
(I had it set at optimum for 16MB ram previously). This seemed to improve
it a bit. The next choice is at 128MB RAM, & I have not bothered to
interpolate manually for 80MB RAM.
So, I just live with the Hard Disk running a lot, & freeze ups. I use
scandisk/defrag once per week, which always improves performance
temporarily. Should I need to do this once per
week?
regards
Stan Bialowas
John Chin wrote:
> At 11:43 PM 3/13/1997 Richard Dennis Smith wrote:
> >The problem occurs mainly in Netscape 3.01, Memory cache 1000 Kb and
> >Disk cache 5000 Kb after a few minutes of using it when the hard drive
> >runs and runs and only stops intermittently. This also occurs in other
> >applications, like my mail client Pegasus.
> >
> >Sometimes after quite a while the programs just freeze up and I must
> >press reset to reboot.
>
> My first choice would be to add more RAM. Bring it to 16MB.
> Your system is choking, trying to lay everything to virtual
> memory (your hard disk).
>
> Win95 and 32-bit Netscape work much better than Win3.1 and
> 16-bit Netscape. But more memory is the key.
>
> Regards,
>
> John Chin
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