5punk

From the PC spec thread

HereComesPete wrote:RAM-3 Gb of corsair value pc3200, nice and swift, turned my pagefile off and reaped the rewards in speed and stability, esp in oblivion.

Now this sounds like a semi-good idea. I'd be willing to buy more RAM than I need for my new PC if it allows me to do this.

2GB being the minimum these days and I wouldn't considering doing it with that much and running games, but with 3-4GB I think this just might work. Forcing the OS to use only real RAM must improve performance for some things. My only question is what happens if and when the OS tries to use more real RAM than there is available and there's no virtual? BSD tiem?

It can speed things up, but you'd better make sure you have more than enough. If it runs out of memory bad things happen. Really though, I doubt it's worth the benefits you might see. Your computer won't be paging much of anything if you have enough RAM in the first place so the upside is dubious at best.

I have 2GB and no swap. Works fine. Will run 2x EVE and CSS at once no probs.

I have tried similar on older machines with less memory and you just get a pop-up balloon thing in the system tray and I think windows creates a temp swap file to get by.

It makes a shit load of difference. Windows (unlike linux) will use the swap file all the time - where as linux only uses the swap file when 'real' memory is full, and not a byte before.

Fear wrote:Windows (unlike linux) will use the swap file all the time - where as linux only uses the swap file when 'real' memory is full, and not a byte before.

This was what I suspected would be the case. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that the Windows XP kernel can't manage the available memory correctly. It is designed to be run on machines that may be under spec'ed by it's casual users and so it makes sense to always use some virtual memory/swap by default.

As long as there's no bad side effects I guess a test is in order when the new machine is built.

the main reason i did this was that my optical drive and my hard drive were on the same power rail thingy from my psu and when the copy protection made the disk spin up and the hard drive work, i got crashes or bsod's as a result of too much power being drawn away from my mobo. With ram alone, a direct result was that i didnt get any more hangs and really fucking annoying messages from windows asking me if all is ok.