reinstall of Studio MX Dreamweaver wont start

message from El8tion on 23 Jul 2004

I've been having computer problems with corrupt files and I had to reinstall
Studio MX. I uninstalled it all except the Extension Manager and then
reinstalled. Everything opens except Dreamweaver MX which shows the splash
screen then locks up with my HD spinning continuous. I've reinstalled a few
times with no luck. I am running Win98SE, Avast is my anti-virus. Should I try
installing to a different file location?

thanks.

El8tion replied to El8tion on 23 Jul 2004

I should note that dreamweaver was opening fine before but I was getting some
JS errors and so I thought that a file might have become corrupted so I
reinstalled. Now it will not open past the spalsh screen.

Murray *TMM* replied to El8tion on 23 Jul 2004

Running DMX on W9x/Me is going to be something that requires constant
intervention to prevent routine OS crashing. The problem is that the
operating system is just not able to provide the resources that you are
asking it to. Remember that W9x/Me is the last gasp of an OS that was
originally developed in 1984. As such either of these are nearly incapable
of performing as contemporary environments.

All of the W9x/Me variants are based around a memory model that was
originally used in W3x. It has changed, but not in a way that would
significantly
impact this issue since that time.

The salient issue in this memory model is the space that is allocated to the
OS for scratchpad type work, i.e., tracking what processes are running, what
windows are open, what file handles are in use, etc. In 1984, it seemed
perfectly reasonable to make this memory segment be 64K (I think that is the
right number - could be 48K, though), and it was. However in 2003, that
region of memory fills rather quickly.

What happens when that scratchpad space fills up? You get General
Protection Faults, or Kernel32 errors, or system lockups, or BSOD symptoms.
W9x/Me is not graceful when it fails.

How can you prevent this from happening? Not by adding more RAM, since that
scratchpad size is hardwired in the OS, and since it is taken from the first
megabyte of memory, there is not too much you can do by adding hardware.
But there is alot you can do in general (although it will not REALLY be
enough in the long run).

The first thing you have to do is to learn how to monitor this space so you
can know where you stand on the "likely to crash" meter -

System Resources is what you see when you do

START | Settings > Control Panel > System > Performance Tab

and a value of less than 30% for this is indicative of a rapidly approaching
freight train. Save your files and reboot quickly!

After a cold restart, and before running anything else, you *SHOULD* have a
SR value of about 80%. If you do not, then you have already added so much
to your system (over time, probably) that you can expect to have continuing
problems. Look at your System Tray, and see how many icons you have there.
Each one of those is a background process that is stealing resources. Do a
CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the processes listed in that Panel. If you have
more than about 10, then you are losing lots of your resources to these.

The answer is (if you must continue using these antique operating systems
instead of upgrading to W2KPro or WXPPro - a much more robust and suitable
OS), then you must aggressively prune all of the unnecessary
background/startup processes from your system by removing them from your
startup process. Using msconfig for this is a good place to start.

Hope that helps you - remember 80% after a cold boot will keep you pretty
clean.

To see more detail on W9x/Me and Resources, go here -

http://apptools.com/rants/resources.php

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