I CAN NOT be only one with this problem.

[LesterP]

i just did my semi-annual format/clean install of win98 SE and was hoping in the process to figure out something that has troubled me since moving to SE from origional win98. i have 128mb RAM, and used to have over 100mb free after bootup w/ win98 origional. after moving to SE i noticed at some point that i had only about 77mb free after bootup, and no matter what i did (i am a psycho-tweaker, so i have a super clean bootup process - clean autoexec/config.sys, just the basics load under 'run' and 'run once' services in the registry, etc.) no help.

during last nights clean install, i had pulled all my pci cards and was adding them back one at a time and BINGO when i put my vortex 1 sound card in and loaded the driver, rebooted, i HAD my culprit. so after disabling sb pro emulation in device manager and rem-ing the line for it in autoexec, i had back only 1mb of mem. and still stood at 78mb free after a reboot. uninstalled the aureal drivers and pulled the card and PRESTO, i'm back to over 100mb free.

the odd thing is i just built a friend a box with a msi 6163pro (bx) board and an ESS Maestro 2 pci sound card, and the same problem occurs.

my sys:
abit bf6/650E/128mb ram/aureal vortex 1/netgear nic/geforce - no irq conflicts, no sharing, nuthin! ANYBODY have any ideas????

[psyklone]

well it sounds like you yanked it out of your autoexec.bat, but did you check msconfig under the startup tab? a lot of sound cards have utilities that load in the registry. check that for sound utils and uncheck 'em!

cheers!

[LesterP]

thanks, but no - nothing gets loaded via registry startup.

when you install a aureal sound card it installs up to 5 devices - multifuntion platform, gameport, midi, sb pro emulation, blah, blah.

[BBA]

I think there's a good chance it's the soundfont cache size. See, the PCI cards do not have onboard memory, so they reserve and use system memory for fonts. If you loaded a 8M set, then thats a likely cause.

I think they should have their own memory built in like the old AWE series from CL, but that's probably not very profitable for teh manufacturers.