Subj : Re: Supermium
To   : All
From : August Abolins
Date : Sun Sep 21 2025 08:35:00

Hello Ky.Moffet!

** On Friday 19.09.25 - 11:00, you wrote to me:

> There's a flag to make XP use 8GB, and there have been successful shims
> up to 128GB, same as XP64. I have not tried it; instead I wound up
> migrating to XP64.

> Manual patching and caveats:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsxp/comments/1dhtxpd/confused_about_pae_patch
> _for_using_full_ram_on/


Wow.  Not gonna play with that.  Can't afford to muck up my XP  
machine.


> How much physical RAM do you have?

3GB.  I think I *did* have 4GB at one point, but I swapped one  
of the existing 2GB modules to go into another XP machine  
several years ago.  Now the Thinkpad T60 is 2GB + 1GB.


> XP natively supports 8GB RAM. The 4GB (3GB after hardware
> reserve) limit was actually because if you are using an Intel
> video driver, and there's more than 4GB, the driver crashes
> the system. Intel wouldn't fix it (in part because the issue
> goes way back to the days when 4GB RAM was a crazy dream, and
> fixing it would have done nothing for older systems), nearly
> all OEM systems had Intel graphics, and few had over 2GB let
> alone 4GB, so Microsoft set an artificial limit as a way to
> broadly solve the problem for the majority of customers.

Interesting back story wrt to the 3GB limit. Had not heard of  
that kludge.  Thx.


> An interesting comment seen somewhere:

> What you can do (and what I usually do) is use the Gavotte
> ramdisk trick. Gavotte ramdisk can create a ramdisk out of
> the remainder of the 8GB of installed RAM. You then tell
> Windows to use the ramdisk for your pagefile and, performance
> wise, it's a lot like having 8GB of RAM available

I recall using ramdisks and high-mem on my early 286 and 386  
machines. I used them as temp work spaces.  Luv'd it.

But it might be worth revisiting the matter and drop another  
2GB module in it, and try the ramdisk tool you mentioned.


>>> Also, in settings under "System: make sure "Continue running
>>> background apps when Supermium is closed" is disabled.
>>
>> Ah..  I didn't get a chance to remember that one.  DONE!

> There are so MANY settings now, mostly annoying...

I am still not using Supermium as main browser.  Palemoon has  
been the most reliable sofar.  But Supermium is a good fallback  
for the occassional highly javascripted site.

I try to limit too many tabs and progs open at any time. But  
sometimes, even the core progs that I need all open at the same  
time: MS Access, Excel, the browser, and an email program - can  
trigger a low mem warning - but rarely.  When I investigate the  
processes list, it's usually a rogue process from another  
action that hasn't closed.
-- 
  ../|ug

.