My company wanted to assess a Microsoft
Exchange Server 2003 add-on on a
miniature test network before rolling it out
on our live server. Because we buy only laptops
for our staff and no servers were available
for a test network, I installed Windows
Server 2003 on a Dell Latitude D630 laptop
loaded with 4GB of RAM. However, I had
problems finding the Intel GM965 graphics
driver, so I downloaded the Windows XP
version of the driver and ran the installer
in compatibility mode. The driver installed
fine, but to be sure, I ran several programs
over a period of two days to ensure that
the system was stable before installing
Exchange 2003.
When it came time to install Exchange
2003, I remembered that Microsoft recommends
enabling the /3GB option in the
boot.ini file to prevent fragmentation of
memory when a system has more than 1GB
of RAM. (See “Optimizing Memory Usage
for Exchange Server 2003” at technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998057.aspx.) After enabling this option and rebooting
the system, the logon screen took
a bit longer than usual to load but nothing
else seemed unusual.
I installed Exchange 2003 as I have done
many times before. After rebooting the
system, everything seemed much slower. I
let the system run without interaction, but
every few hours the system would blue
screen. The source of the problem varied,
but I often saw that the source was acpi.sys.
Guessing that something went wrong
during installation, I reinstalled the system
from scratch, repeating each step. Eventually I realized that the problem always
occurred after enabling the /3GB option.
After reading more about the /3GB option,
I determined that only 1GB of RAM was being
reserved for the OS; because the GM965
graphics chip reserves 256MB of RAM for
video use, the /3GB option was causing the
OS to run out of memory. When I disabled
the /3GB option, almost magically everything
began running perfectly. As I found
out the hard way, the /3GB option shouldn’t
be used on systems in which the graphics
memory is shared with the system memory.
Although you don’t typically run graphics
cards on Exchange servers that use shared
memory, this lesson learned might be useful
to other people who create test systems.
—Peter Wong