Today I have upgraded my system memory from 256Mb to 512Mb SDRAM (PIII 600EB / PC133) on a Gigabyte 6CXC motherboard. In the softice initialization settings I have changed Total RAM from 256 to 512 as you would expect. The problem is that when the comp is booted I now get a BSOD saying "VCACHE Device Initialization Failed", then something about not enough memory. (if windoze is loaded without SICE there isn't a problem). Any ideas anyone ?

it's not entirely a SoftICE problem, but that of windows as well. both SoftICE and vcache try to reserve as much memory in the system arena (roughly the upper 1 GB of the linear address space) as much physical ram you have. this adds up to 1 GB in your case - obviously they would leave no room for other VxDs should they succeed. since SoftICE reserves its memory first, vcache's attempt will fail.

to solve the problem, set minfilecache/maxfilecache to values less than your physical ram size. ie, in system.ini add something like this this:


[vcache]
minfilecache=8192
maxfilecache=65536


numbers are in kbytes and for guidance only, feel free to experiment to see what brings you the biggest performance advantage.

Thanks for the help. I have done a bit of digging and came up with the same sort of remedy myself. I have read that it is more of a windoze problem (suprise suprise), and the remedy is to set vcache to between 60% and 70% of your total amount of ram with win98se but never exceed 512Mb regardless. With a bit of experimenting I now have a stable system with both MinFileCache and MaxFileCache set to 346112 (338Mb). The reason I have them both the same is because I have read (using a search on deja.com) that this is the way to go. Any ideas why this has been said, myself I would have thought that MinFileCache should have been in the order of what you suggested. Obviously when SICE is loaded the speed of the machine is not the main consideration, stability is, but I would just like to know what difference lowering MinFileCache would make. Anyway, so far, the machine seems to OK for now - time will tell. Thanks again.

This might seem like a stupid question, but WHY would you need 512 MB of RAM on your personal computer ?

LS

Because it was very cheap and I thought why not. Actually, it has made a slight speed improvement also.