My current x86 computer originally had 512 MB of RAM and has a hard-disk dedicated to Windows 98. However, recently I've been running Linux exclusively on it, and also added another 2 GB of RAM. Today, my father needed to access his old email, and so we needed to boot from Windows. I arranged a grub boot configuration for it and booted it. I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.20-rc5 so it came at the right time. Windows came up the logo was displayed, but eventually a text message like "Insufficient memory to run Windows" was displayed.

I tried to eliminate some problem - I cleared some space out of drive D (normally used for data), set the BIOS to boot the Windows disk, and tried again. Same problem. After discussing it with a friend and googling a bit, I found this page that says that win98 will "freak" if there is more than 2 GB of memory.

If Windows 98 cannot handle more than 2 GB of memory that's fine, but why does it have to freak with an incorrect error message. Can't it utilise only a subset of this memory? Well, I guess that if we'd like to run Windows on this machine again, we'll need to upgrade to Windows XP or whatever. Oh well.