Sysem 7.5.3 Eating Lots of Memory

[jjb]

Hi there,

Bought an old LC III at a thrift shop and have been trying to get it working. Problem is, the OS appears to be consuming a lot more memory than people suggest is normal. I've heard a lot of people say that a minimal install of 7.5.3 should use less than 5MB of RAM, but even on the most minimal settings the system seems to consume 15MB. Any ideas? The system only has 20MB, so the 15 makes it almost unusable.

 

[tgunner]

Was this a fresh install? We will need to know that first.

 

[jjb]

LC III Installation

LC III Installation

Thanks for the reply. It depends what you mean by fresh install... I couldn't wipe the hard drive completely because I don't have enough floppies to store the 7.5.3 images, so instead I copied the images (via network) to the hard disk drive, made a boot floppy, deleted the old system folder & installed 7.5.3 from there.

 

[sbrown]

First off, are you using the proper addressing for your amount of memory? IIRC you need 32 bit addressing on for anything over 10mb of ram, or else the system will count anything over 10mb as used by system software.

If you have 20 and the system itself shows as using 15 in the About this Mac panel, then go to the memory control panel, select 32 bit addressing, & restart.

Example: If I turn off 32 bit addressing my pb230 duo uses 18.5mb out of 24mb, but with it system software takes only 2539k.

 

[jjb]

Thanks, that solved my problem! Had no idea about the 32-bit addressing.