On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, Mark Browne wrote: > Oddly, > ME boots much slower after I added 256mb of memory! > I expected the slowdown on memeory POST but what the heck is the OS doing > with it? Back in the days of 486s and Win95, I discovered a neat, umm, feature(?) of Win95. I was running a 586 chip in my machine but I needed money one day so I ran down to Computer Renassaince (sp?) and sold it for $35. I bought a 486-25 for $5 to replace it. What happened next I can only explain in that "it's Microsoft". I popped the 486 chip in, and to my disbelief, Win95 booted FASTER on it. As a whole my system was slower, but I couldn't get over the fact that boot time was incredibly fast. I then postulated that Win95 is loading crap on startup, probably caching certain things so the OS appears to run faster. The more resources, the more crap it caches. Anyway, that might explain why Windows boots slower with more RAM. It sees your new and cool resources and wants to "embrace and extend" them. On the flip side, you should see a decent increase in performance once the machine is booted. -Brian