Hi BG Smith,
Interesting problem you have there. Windows 98 runs fine on 32Mg of RAM, 128Mg is excellent, and 256Mg is borderline overkill. You should not have any RAM resource difficulties with that amount. It appears to me that you have a memory leak somewhere with one of your open programs. On a standard system, I can have over 6-8 Netscape windows open at the same time. And that's on a 64Mg system. Do you know if there is any specific plugins that are running that could be bogging the system down? Anything other than Netscape running when the GDI resource warnings come up? To test I would recommend running the Resource Meter and the System Monitor in the background of your system to tell you exactly what is sucking up CPU/Memory usage.
C:\Windows\rsrcmtr.exe (Resource Meter)
C:\Windows\sysmon.exe (System Monitor)
From experience, some streaming video programs and other multimedia programs can cause this.
For your second computer, networking the two together is a real breeze. They're both solid systems (128Mg, 256Mg) so I wouldn't worry about resources too much.
"Should I upgrade the older Win95 to a 32 bit version or put Win98 on it?"
Both Windows 95 and 98 are 32-bit operating systems. You won't get too many benefits upgrading the other system to 98. Might as well leave it as it is since your comfortable with the interface.
You'll need two network cards (one per system) unless you already have them. They're pretty cheap ($10-50 US), as well as some network cable. It goes for maybe $0.30/foot. If you are only networking the two systems, you can get a cable made up at almost any tech shop. Just make sure you specify that it's system-to-system cabling. Otherwise, you'll have to pick up a cheap hub for about $30. The second option is sometimes better because it allows you to add another system later on without reconfiguring the cabling.
The actual process to set up the operating system to see the other system is also pretty easy. That's sometime that the tech guys can let you in on, or I could post step-by-step instructions here if need be.
If you wanted to share your modem connection with the other system, you could get modem-sharing software such as Sygate or Wingate:
sygate.com
wingate.com
Pretty cheap, easy to set up and a great way to save the cost of adding another Internet connection.
Hope this helps,
Rich |
