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[LisaRCT]

OK, I built me a system last year and went for broke installing 1.5GB of DDR-2700 RAM so as to avoid any memory shortage and hopefully boost performance.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something (I am all self-taught, mostly through the school of hard knocks and crashed systems), but I am not happy that I always have about 1.oGB of RAM available.

Seems to me that while it is good to have plenty of RAM in reserve, there is alot of RAM in my system that is not being put to work. To me this is an opportunity for improved performance as well as CASH sitting there doing nothing!

Am I off-track here, or is there some way to make Windows XP use more of my available RAM? And will that improve performance as I expect? I assume this is somewhat related to 'pagefiles' and 'virtual memory'?

Any comments, ideas, web-links, suggestions?
. . . I am not proud, I will take compliments    
. . . . . . . . Gifts too  

Media Center Registered 9.0.180 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center\

Microsoft Windows XP  Workstation 5.1 Service Pack 1 (Build 2600)
AMD Athlon 1732 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 1572 MB, Free - 1053 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2800.1106 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82 (xpsp1.020828-1920) / Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2800.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920) / Shell32.dll: 6.00.2800.1145 (xpsp2.021108-1929) / wnaspi32.dll: N/A
Ripping /   Drive N:   Copy mode:ModeSecure   CD Type:Auto   Read speed:Max
 Drive O:   Copy mode:ModeSecure   CD Type:Auto   Read speed:Max
 Drive P:   Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer   CD Type:Auto   Read speed:Max
 Digital playback: Yes /  Use YADB: Yes /  Get cover art: Yes /  Calc replay gain: No /  Copy volume: 32767
 Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No  

Burning /  Drive P: PLEXTOR  CD-R   PX-W4012A   Addr: 0:1:0  Speed:40  MaxSpeed:40  Use MJ Engine:Yes
 Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: No /  Write CD-Text: Yes
 Use playback settings: No /  Normalization: None

[DocLotus]

Set up a RAM Drive (a virtual drive in memory) & use it for your Windows swap file.  Should improve Windows performance.

I've also heard of a few people that used the RAM Drive to copy the whole Windows folder into it (at boot-up) for better performance.

In hind site (always 20-20, huh?) some of the money for extra memory may of been better spent for Flash memory that the whole operating system could of been installed in.  That would of provided almost instant booting & very fast Windows accessing.

Better luck next time

[LisaRCT]

Set up a RAM Drive (a virtual drive in memory) & use it for your Windows swap file.  Should improve Windows performance.

Hmm, I remember using RamDrives in DOS  
Haven't toyed with that in Windows, and have toyed with very little in WinXP 'cept a few minor Registry edits and some tweaking . . .  but I couldn't help myself,
I swear!  

I will have to do some research on that and give it a whirl.  I will try the swapfile thing if I can manage it, but the WIndows running from ramdrive sounds to be a bit much and a bit risky.

In hind site (always 20-20, huh?) some of the money for extra memory may of been better spent for Flash memory that the whole operating system could of been installed in.  That would of provided almost instant booting & very fast Windows accessing.
Better luck next time

Another Hmmm . .  flash memory eh? Now this is mind-expansion  
Another research project and possible 'wish-list' item (jeez, I may never get that iPod   :-/   )

Thanks for the good luck wishes  
and the brain candy  

[escaflo]

I've tried using this software before.

www.superspeed.com/ramdisk.html

It allows you to create a ramdisk. Applications which resides on there loads fast.. . The catch is that as it is a ramdisk, you will need to press a button to write the data that reside on the ramdisk before you restart your computer or shutdown your computer so that it will copy whatever data there is on the ramdisk to the physical hdd. The next time you boot up, the ramdisk will automatically copy whatever data is in the folder back to the ramdisk (this usually cos a slow down in startup)

there's another one www.superspeed.com/supercache.html which uses ur ram to caches the program. This is good. You can make a small partition let's say about 2 gig, and you run supercache on that partition then you set that partition as your virtual memory drive. What supercache does is that it will cache that drive into ram when you need it making the subsequent call to retreive data from the virtual memory faster. I've also tried this and personally i think this increase performance of software (most probably loading time) by about 10-20% i will say at the very least.

[Doc_Holiday]

You are correct about windows using only 512MB of RAM.  That's all any person really needs.  If you start doing some video editing with a program that can use the ram then you will see your usage go up.

512 is all any person really needs and all Windows needs to run at it's peak level.  So I am sorry to say for what you're doing 1.5GB is overkill.

[Swordsman]

Hey DocLotus,
  Can you really boot and run Windows from flash memory?  I did a Google search but didn't find anything...  It sounds like it would really speed things up, but I'd like to see how it's done before I just go and try it myself...  Any articles or sites you could refer me to?

Thanks!
  Swordsman

[DocLotus]

Don't recall any articles but I do recall reading a long time ago about it.

Seems that you need a flash memory card that acts like another hard drive.  The operating system is installed into the flash memory drive instead of an actual mechanical drive.

As the flash memory is permanent (like a hard drive) you could then boot from it.

You might do a Google search on flash memory or flash cards & see what turns up.

Sorry I don't recall anymore details.

[JimH]

They used to be called RAM drives, but I don't recall seeing any lateley.

[KingSparta]

back in the old 8-bit days when computers had 48k of memory i had a 1 meg ram drive. it was an extra box that hooked to the computer and the memory could be formated into more than one drive. it cost about $1,000+ back then and was state of the art.

MS dos also had Ram Drive software. it was part of the RAMDRIVE.SYS Device driver

it was part of the Config.SYS and parms were

device=c:\dos\ramdrive.sys 740 /E

740 is KB

/E Is extended Memory

Ramdrive for Windows 2000 & Windows XP

http://www.cyberwizardpit.net/article3.htm