Replacing HIMEM.SYS with HIMEMX.EXE will allow you to boot since it delays recognition of the space used by the RAMDisk, but it will crash if you fill up the RAMDisk. There is not enough space in your configuration to support a 512MiB RAMDisk so Windows crashes during boot. This ties up System Arena space which is limited to 1 GiB total. XMS RAMDisks such as XMSDSK.EXE are managed by the Windows Memory Manager. I understand, why I had doubts in large file caching efficiency, now. So, less than a half of memory was used for file caching. I've noticed my MaxFileCache setting was a bit below 400000. The problem with GUI booting along with the ram drive does not seem to be related to a specific GPU, as the same story happens with the onboard Intel 845 graphics controller. The same problem happend with NVidia GPU, so it seems there are some BIOS related problems here. So, I had to fall back to APM to get the grahics card working. I was unable to get Ati All In Wonder 9000 working with ACPI in this particular computer. I'm experimenting with Dell Optiplex GX260. ASD reports problem with reading ESCD data from PnP BIOS. But the Windows stops on IOS device initialization (Bootlog.txt). The ram drive is working and VOL command works correctly, all right.
Video card: Ati Radeon 9600XT onBoard (128 MiB AGP 8x) VCACHE.VxD: Xeno86's 4., VMM.VXD: original 4. Video card: MSI MS-8817 V1 nVidia GeForce2 MX400 PRO32S (32 MiB AGP 4x)ĭEVICE=HIMEMX.EXE /NUMHANDLES=80 /TESTMEM:ON