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Is this the holy grail to solving windows-out-of-resources bugs?

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app103:
Regarding Win 9x: I sometimes still use Win 98 SE on an old machine and while it's generally okay, I keep running into the "low resources" problem (running out of user/GDI resources because the resource heaps were too limited by design). I've seen enough descriptions of this problem, but nobody seems to ever have patched it. A similar simple fix for 9x would have been great.
-alxwz (July 27, 2007, 05:33 PM)
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Even though you can't really fix the problem on 9x, you at least get a nice resource meter with the operating system, that you can keep in your tray to let you know how things stand. (green is good)

Unlike XP, which you have no idea how close to the limit you are and when things will start screwing up on you. (you only get a CPU meter to keep in your tray, if you minimize the task manager) The only warning I have in XP, is when context menus start missing entries. Then I know bigger trouble is on its way.

Funny, I've never bumped into this problem with win2k or XP... And I've run lots of apps, very resource-hungry apps, and have had uptimes of 14+ days.-f0dder (July 28, 2007, 06:45 AM)
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I always bump into this problem about every 5-7 days. Yeah, sure, if you close some things and wait, it does get better, but you hit that limit faster and faster till you reboot. It's the reason my uptime isn't what it should be with XP. I have better uptime with my 9x machine. And the problem became worse when I upgraded to IE 7, for some reason. (and I don't use IE 7, directly)

The problem doesn't happen with a few resource intensive apps running...more like when I have a lot of things running (regardless of how resource intensive they are), or many browser windows open, with each having a lot of tabs.

My daughter ran into this problem all the time on her ex-boyfriend's pc while doing photo-work in Paintshop Pro, and didn't really know what it was at the time. It seemed to limit the amount of images she could open at one time, to about 20. After that, new images would refuse to open and the application would start acting weird with the menus.

This is not a setting in the program, as far as I know. It has no limits you can set for the number of images you can have open, and I don't have any limits on this machine with the same version of Paintshop Pro. I can open 100+ at one time (not that I normally would).

alxwz: I'm not sure there's a simple fix for win9x, parts of the operating system still runs 16bit code from the win3.x days... there's some hard limits there. Basically, don't try to run 3d studio max or other GDI-intensive stuff on win9x.
-f0dder (July 28, 2007, 06:45 AM)
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Hardware limitations prevent me from running things like that on my 9x machine, but you can still run some rather GDI-intensive things...just make sure that is all you are running (close anything you really don't need), make sure you have freshly rebooted the machine first, and be prepared to reboot again when you are done.

It's how I run things like Delphi 6 and Dreamweaver 4 on a machine that doesn't meet the min specs for running those applications. I still have problems with TightVNC when there is an active connection, though, no matter what I do.

mouser, when you finish tell us how the thing went :)
-Lashiec (July 27, 2007, 09:39 AM)
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I have tried this fix on my XP machine and I will let everyone know how it worked out for me (in about a week or so).

f0dder:
Hm, pretty weird I've never bumped into that problem - I mean, I've done things like having Visual Studio 2005 open with a decent-sized project, paint shop pro 8 with a bunch of images, µtorrent happily churning away in the background, several cmd.exe prompts, screenshot captor, process explorer, thebat, website watcher and plenty more stuff, after a week of uptime... sure, I do have 2 gigs of ram, but according to that article it's because of a fixed-size heap limit, so I should've seen it anyway? :-s

Hardware limitations prevent me from running things like that on my 9x machine, but you can still run some rather GDI-intensive things...just make sure that is all you are running (close anything you really don't need), make sure you have freshly rebooted the machine first, and be prepared to reboot again when you are done.
-app103
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Hehe, good thing I got away from 9x years ago :)

I remember playing with 3d studio max on my win98se... was hellish. I did have to jump through those reboot-and-cleanup hoops, but eventually I'd run out of GDI resources, and I'd have to reboot. Didn't get the GDI BSODs very often though, thankfully.

zridling:
I read the 64-bit, part 2 info on the Desktop Heap, but it didn't offer a fix.  :mad:

alxwz:
With 9x, I typically run into the problem with modern multi-tab browsers (Opera, K-Meleon) very quickly.
I do use the resource meter, but it doesn't help a lot here (and consumes some resources itself).

Regarding the XP problem, it seems to be better now, AFAICT.

Oh, I forgot: The 9x resource meter tells you how low your resources are but not which app uses how much. Has anyone seen an alternative resource meter for 9x which can do this? I tried to find one some time ago but couldn't (I think I even tried Sysinternal's Process Explorer which didn't do it, either, if I remember correctly).

Lashiec:
That is quite strange. I've used Opera with tons of tabs open in a 128 MB machine, and I didn't had problems with the resources. Maybe because my computer was disconnected from the Internet?

I don't remember any app like that. Resources usage in Windows is quite random, for my monitoring experience, and some apps consume resources in a progressive scale, like PowerTools, and they only release them when they totally close. Others, like browsers, I think they change depending on the graphical load of the page rendered.

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