Memory Leak - Win98

[djones2002]

Hello All.

I am curious to know if 98 has an inherent memory leak that ties things up after a day or so of a machine being left on. Have any of you heard of this before? Had a couple of machines that were running defrag over the weekend just bog-down and die. Nothing out of the ordinary was running besides defrag. Any help you can provide is appreciated.

Dennis Jones

 

[mscallisto]

Have you tried defrag in safe mode (probably the best way)?

OR if running in windows environment:

Are you sure you stopped everything before starting defrag?

Does your pallet area show any TSR's running except maybe the speaker volumn?

Did you exit Office Bar, stop screen savers, virus scanners, printer monitor etc.

Did you run msconfig to see what tsr's are running?

 

[djones2002]

Good morning...thanks for the reply. I'll check on those tips. I can say that there are probably a few things running in the system tray (a print agent for a 16-bit DOS DB, for one thing). Is it me, or does Win 9x seem to have trouble whenever there's 16-bit code involved? Thanks again...

 

[1c3man]

Djones, I just defragged my 98 system and now I have lost my sound and also my CPU sems to be running at 25% constantly. Just done rebuild and the same thing is happening

Getting bit annoyed now to say the least.I had nothing running in System tray and all processes were cancelled (except Explorer)

Done tests to on H/W etc and all come up okay.
Seems as if something is trying to run in background. Let me know if you have any luck and I will post you if I sort it out.

Ice

 

[mscallisto]

Well if your cpu is running at only 25% avail then I agree you probably have something running in the background.

Do you have a virus protect software running? I it probably time to test for a memory virus to at least rule that out.

 

[djones2002]

IMHO: The Win9x platform is leaky by nature. Also IMHO, Win2K and above seem to be much better at handling memory...I've tried a few fixes listed on an FAQ (The FAQ directed me to Q253912 in Microsoft's knowledge DB). Tweaked the MaxFileCache setting in System.ini and set it lower than what I had. This has the effect of putting a limit on what the system can grab for itself and clears up more for misc processes. I also ran MSCONFIG from the run box and was able to further tweak my startup settings...thanks for the help all.

 

[cdogg]

Yes, you'll come to find that Win9x/ME operating systems are not meant to be left on for long periods of time. Even if you take everything away from task manager, you'd be lucky to squeeze 3 days out of it!

NT operating systems are far superior in handling and maintaining resources...


~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[rockerfellerz]

It's true that 98 is less stable /has more problems than 2000, but it is possible to get more than 3 days out of it. I've run one of my machines with a server on it for 60 days straight 24/7 with no problems. It depends on the apps you use. Some are terrible and will crash your computer every single day! If you're going through Hell...keep going... (Winston Churchill)
RocKeRFelLerZ

 

[mscallisto]

cdogg still has the best advice spend two minutes and re-boot, it cures many ills.

As rockerfellerz points out it's possible to keep the system up for long periods of time but for those poorly written apps that fail to release memory, I tell all my users to reboot while you fill your coffee cup each morning.

 

[djones2002]

We are currently porting our main db app to run on Win2k, but it's not going well. Its a 16-bit DOS app that runs well on 98, but on 2k it becomes flakey. We are going to try XP running compatibility mode and see what happens. Hopefully that will eliminate these memory issues.

 

[cdogg]

Good idea. 16-bit DOS apps have a better chance under XP than they do in 2K. Most of it has to do with a refined kernel that can run 16-bit virtual machines (VM) without interferring with 32-bit processes.


~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein