"Actually, 512 meg is too much, unless you're running an application like Photoshop that has it's own memory manager. Generally speaking, you won't see any improvement in performance once you get over 128 meg. M$ themselves admits to there being a problem in this area, particularly with lockups on machines with 512 meg or more of physical memory.

This problem exists with all their 9x OS's. "

9X can only efficiently use about 160 Mb. Anything over 256 will actually slow the system down in most cases. [ depending on the motherboard & BIOS ] When 98 first came out, most systems were running 32 to 64 Mb of memory & 128 to 256 sticks were in servers. It wasn't built to run large amounts of RAM like NT 4.0 / 2000 / XP was.
Anything that will grab & use anything from 192 & above will usually crash most 98 systems."