Here's one for ya! First the specs, so you can get a clearer picture of the situation.

The board: MSI K7T Turbo (no RAID)

The CPU: AMD Athlon 1800+ @ 1.5Ghz (I DO not, and WILL not O/C)

The Memory: (CL3) PC-133, three 256MB modules, three different brands, but all three have the same timings. (yes, I'm sure)

The Video: ATI Radeon 9600XT (made by Visiontek) with 256MB ram (@ 4X agp)

The OS: Windows 98SE

The Problem: I have just RECENTLY started having the dreaded " out of available system memory" error (dreaded by Win 98 users that is) pop up on me while loading FS9, after having NO trouble for more than a year with the same rig.

Here's what happened:

I've read all the articles I could find by MS and others about how Windows 9x might have trouble on systems with more than 512MB of ram, and how to fix it. So before ANY errors were showing up, I was thinking (I may stop doing this, as it usually only leads to trouble) that if I made the corrections recommended by MS anyway,  I might be able to squeeze a little more juice out of this old machine. It didn't seem to make any difference. So I changed it back. (everything I modified, I returned to it's original state) Then low and behold.........ERRORS.

Now here is where this gets interesting........ I loaded EVERYTHING I had on the "problem installation drive" onto a fresh clean hard drive. What I mean is, I did fresh installs of everything I had on the first drive, on a second, so-as to have a nice new "un-fixed" drive again, setup the same way the first one was (before I "fixed" it). In fact, the only files that were actually transferred from one drive to the other, were my FS9 add-ons (including modules and other non-standard files that were located in the FS9 main folder).

Now when I "fixed" the problem on the first drive by doing the msconfig trick as described on MS's website, would anything in the flight sim folder have changed too? ( something that may not have returned to it's native state when I "un-fixed" it) Because after I got everything setup on the second drive, the way it was on the first (before I messed with it) I had the same problem right off the bat. (again, only while loading FS9)

I know the easiest thing to do, would be to install XP on this machine again (had it a long time ago) but I would hate to do that because I could never get as good a performance out of FS9 with the drivers made for XP, as I could with the ones for 98. (always 3-6 FPS slower with XP, granted it's not a huge difference, but on a system like mine, it hurts)

Any ideas? (besides dynamite......I thought about that already)