Subj : Re: Supermium
To   : August Abolins
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Fri Sep 19 2025 15:00:00

AUGUST ABOLINS wrote:
> Hello Ky.Moffet!
> 
> ** On Sunday 14.09.25 - 11:04, Ky.Moffet wrote to me:
> 
>>> It has silently closed here (XP) several times.  But, before
>>> that happens, my system (MemInfo 3.43) reports "Low memory".
> 
> [...]
> 
>> But on 32bit XP, even with the default max supported 4GB of
>> system RAM, you really only have 3GB to work with (one GB is
>> not really available), and for any modern browser, that's
>> nowhere near enough.
> 
> Yes..  I am well aware for the inaccessible 1GB over 3GB.  :(

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/

How much physical RAM do you have?

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.

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


>>> One of the latest crashes/closures did something to prevent
>>> me from putting my XP to Sleep.  Had to do a hard shutdown
>>> [hold power button until powers off] :(
> 
>> Open up Task Manager, sort by name, close anything named chrome.exe
> 
> I just had another episode where I got "Low memory" and I was
> unable suspend the laptop.  There were actually several
> chrome.exe in the process list.  I killed one of them, and
> suddenly suspend worked.   THX!

Mondo! Yeah, I think so long as there is a network connection, some part 
of the browser just can't turn loose of it, therefore can't shut down. I 
vaguely recall we used to physically disconnect to get rid of the problem.

> 
> There were a total of 3 chrome.exe instances originally.  After
> killing one of them, and comingback out of suspend, there was
> only one chrome.exe in the list.

Yeah, that's expected.

>> 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...

>> At a very wild guess, disabling "hardware acceleration" might
>> help --Chrome might have hold of the graphics driver that way
>> and can't turn loose.
> 
> Now DONE!
> 
> Thanks, again!
> 
  Welcome! Hope all works now.
 þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com

--- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462
 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com (454:1/1)

.