Hello everyone - I'm new here and I apologise to start by taking up your time - but I was wondering if anyone can help me with this problem? Its got a lot of knowledgeable people baffled! I would be grateful for any replies. Thankyou in advance!

Motherboard 1st mainboard by FIC. Socket A. Award BIOS

Processor AMD Athlon 1 Ghz
Memory 512Mb (2x256Mb 133 Mhz DIMMS. Motherboard supports 100Mhz.
OS Windows 98 SE (clean install)
Graffics Card Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 500 (Geforce III)

And heres a brief history:

Developed weird colour effects on graphics (I was running a Geforce II Pro at the time with 256Mb RAM). First noticed it when watching video. Fleshtones were terrible and shadows were also bad. It looked a bit like when you try and display a 16 Bit colour image in 256 colours, if you know what I mean.
This then started to manifest itself in other areas. Splash screens, games etc. Vivid colours were OK, but more muted colours always looked terrible. An example is at the end of eracer, whilst waiting for others to finish, it dims the background graphics. The degradation was terrible.
I did everything I could with drivers but nothing worked. It was suggested to me that my card had probably overheated. I tried reformatting the computer, and when I restarted the games became jerky and frame rates dropped so low everything was unplayable. After several formats, I gave up and bought myself the Geforce III.
I still got the same problems, however, so I ran 3dmark2000. I got reasonable scores (around 5000) but not as high as they should be. When reading reports that the program generated, it highlighted a chronic lack of RAM.
I therefore went out this morning and bought another stick. However, even with 512Mb in, I find myself down to (hang on I'll check - I just benchmarked it and found 233.98Mb free out of 512 Mb). I'll now close the benchmark down, and without running anything else I'll open it again. I bet I get roughly half the amount. Here goes.......
There you go surprise surprsie! 128.72. It seems that anything that uses a lot of RAM is staying in there and not being flushed properly!
Even when starting up I have less than half the RAM available that I should. If I start up afresh, my games are fine, but after a couple of races the jerkiness comes back again. The funny colours have gone on games, but are still on splash screens and video.

I really am at my wits end!

Have you tried swapping in a different monitor?

Have you messed with your monitor settings?

<b><font color=blue>~scribble~</font color=blue></b> <A HREF="http://www.ud.com/home.htm" target="_new">Help cure cancer.</A>

Hi - thanks for the prompt reply.

I have, but would that effect the memory drain?

A few questions, if you don't mind.

Is your mainboard the FIC AZ11E w/the VIA Apollo KT133 chipset? And if so, have you installed:

DirectX
VIA 4-in-1 Chipset drivers?

Are the AGP settings in the BIOS at 4X, and is the AGP Aperture at 64 or larger?

Have you installed the Monitor driver? What is your desktop resolution/refresh rate/color depth?

What version of the video card driver are you running with the card? Did you install the driver manually, or run the Installer in the self-extracting .exe file?

In the Device Manager, is there is any other device besides the IRQ Holder For PCI Steering sharing an IRQ with the Video Card?

Are your hard drives and optical devices DMA?

Before you start gaming, if you use the Task Manager to turn off all devices except Explorer and Systray, do you experience the same jerkiness?

Toejam31

<font color=red>My Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847" target="_new"><font color=green>Toejam31's Tantalizing Tantric Toy</font color=green></A>
____________________________________________________________

<font color=purple>"Procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."</font color=purple>

Of course I don't mind questions! I really appreciate the help! AGP Aperture is set to 128Mb and have also tried at 64Mb. AGP 4x mode is enabled. Don't know about the chipset - how do I find that out?

The thing is games are fine at first. It is only when the RAM rapidly decreases that I start to see the effect in gsmes!

Ohh, don't worry, this is a normal effect in Win9x/Me. They hog all the RAM for cache.

Try this:

Open up your system.ini file:
1.) Scroll to the bottom
2.) If the following isn't already in there or the values are different, try this
[vcache]
MinFileCache=131072
MaxFileCache=131072

This sets a fixed cache size for Windows to 128MB of your system RAM and should fix that part of your problem. Since you have 512MB RAM, I'd set the AGP Aperture to 256MB.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

Thanks for the advice. I tried this as you said!

When I restarted I had 512Mb of physical RAM with 260Mb free. I closed down the program and restarted, I had 160Mb of RAM. I closed down and restarted again, I am now down to 60.56!

Did you reformat the HDD and reinstall everything?

Did you check to see if you have a virus hacking your registry?

Memory would not cause a repetatively decrease in the memory available at startup. Video Card would not either.

Peanut Gallery - What other senarios would cause his available RAM to consistantly deacrease itself by 100 MB each time other than a virus?

<b>"The events of my life are quite inconsequential.." - Dr. Evil</b>