I’ve been getting an error on startup that says “The system has reached the maxium size allowed for the system part of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored.”
I know the usual routine of re-installing XP every couple of years, but I was hoping to get a fix to buy me a little time since the box is running fairly well other than a few video related crashes since this error began.
I’ve ran several free “cleaners” but the problem only disappeared for a few days and now its back at every startup.
AMD 9500, 3GB RAM and a 250GTS XFX video card. HD is 320GB with 160GB free.
I’ve been running NVIDIA cards for awhile so that is probably part of it. I’m gonna run CCleaner tonight and insert the reg entry to up the size. I had changed and existing entry but it was a little different from the one listed in PM’s article.
It’s been almost a year and a half since the last fresh install. Lot of upgrades and game install/uninstalls during that time has clogged the registry up is all I can figure.
“Note On Windows Server 2003, there is a limitation for the system hive to 12 MB when we use the /3GB switch. In Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the limit increases to 110 MB.”
I’m running XP instead of 2003 but I do have the 3GB switch set. Also I have taken out 2 of the 4Gb RAM I had because of a faulty stick.
I’m not sure if it was the 3GB switch alone or a combination but I’ve been through three boots with no error message since I removed it.
Quick rundown of what I did.
Set the limit in the registry to max then ran CCleaner and several other registry cleaners and nothing helped. Uninstalled everything I didn’t need and ran cleaner to remove Nvidia junk. None of this helped.
Took the switch out of the Boot.ini and the problem “seems” to be gone.
I’m going to uninstall and reinstall my video drivers and see if the error comes back when it tries to write to the registry again.
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