Monday, December 24, 2007

Windows XP: problems with more RAM

so, I recently bought my aging XP laptop some upgrades: a new battery, a new power cord and 2GB of RAM! I figured adding RAM will help things a little bit (though I have to admit, I didn't have a very clear goal for doing all this in mind. I guess I just didn't want to spend on a brand new laptop just yet. Heard they're shipping with Vista. Seriously though, I think I did it because I dread having to reinstall everything on a new machine and getting it to be exactly how I like it).

Anyways, my feeling was that adding more memory would only smoothen things out and make everything a whole lot better. For the most part, that is exactly what happened. However, I began to notice that the machine wouldn't hibernate any longer. It seemed to be on for days. The other day, I happened to catch a system bubble with the message "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API". What!!?? It had less resources than before?

So out came Google and I started hunting around. About 10 minutes of hunting later, I figured out that others were seeing this problem as well (described in Microsoft KB90905)

So apparently the internal kernel structures were somehow setup inefficiently so that when the RAM size was suddenly increased on the system, it just didn't have a big enough hiberfile setup to be able to dump all memory contents to disk and would hence complain about not having "enough" resources. The hotfix took care of that one. I'm surprised though that it didn't get picked up by my machine automatically. Thought the system would be smart enough to know that the machine has more than 1GB of RAM (threshold for the problem is about a gig of RAM, apparently). Guess they don't have detailed conditions like that specified in their hotfix query database. Whatever. 'Tis fixed.

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