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.

So I went with Ofer to buy more memory on Monday. As it turned out I was a bit distracted and for the first time he had to park his car and wait for me a little. We drove to the store, and bought the memory units there - 2 of 1 GB. I asked for a receipt and got it. Then when I said my name, someone overheard me, and it turned out he knew me from the Israeli FOSS Internet, and from Haifux. We chatted a bit and then parted.

During the evening, I tried to install the memory modules myself, but it didn't work at first, so my father helped me and we were successful. 2.5 GB RAM in total, excluding the 1 GB swap, out of 4 GB, which is the board's maximal amount of RAM. Now, everything feels more snappy - it takes less than a minute to start a new konsole window or a gvim window, and I can probably run some Java applications without making my system completely unresponsive.

On a slightly different note, I went to the records' store in the Ramat Aviv Mall, and bought the CD "Explosive - the best of bond". It's pretty good.