Swapfile

[Sgt. Starbuck]

I am trying a program that allows you to make a Ramdrive in XP. I built a box with 4 gig of ram. I have disabled paging but get blue screens when some badly written program wants a swap file. I have also noticed that even with this much memory Windows INSISTS on using a couple of hundred meg idling away as a pagefile on my hard drive so I am using the extra ram as a swapfile on a ramdisk (a portion of memory that Windows sees as another hard drive). I'll keep you posted on my progress, Yesterday I opened all of my MS Office apps and STEAM and 13 other apps without so much as a hiccup.

Tech

Here is the link for those who wish to experiment. The cost is right up my alley...free.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

 

[GreenMonkey]

after having taken my operating systems class, all i can say is - why would you do that? Granted i see that you may be trying to make your machine run faster? I dont really think that it will do quite what you think it will be doing.


The reason you are getting a bsod is because everytime a program runs, in windows, linux, unix, etc every program thinks it has full access to the total ammount of RAM on the system. Clearly, that isnt the case since it must share that with every other program as well. So instead, part of the memory gets maped to the hard drive.

By disabling your pagefile, when a program expects to use all 4 GB (even if it doesnt actually use 4 GB) it thinks it can write to anyplace in RAM but if your ram is now shared between all of your programs then one program may access memory which does not belong to it. Windows will then say 'hey you cant do that' and probably segmentation fault the program. If however, windows doe snot catch the infraction then the program may tamper with someone elses memry including windows itself and thus bsod.

In reality you are probably decreasing the availible ram to each progrma individually and you probably can notice that you are using more of your RAM then previousely. Now you have less total memory available to run your games with and that can lead to lesser performance.

Be sure to report in with your final results though.

 

[Sgt. Starbuck]

As stated, my Win XP reports 3 GB of Ram when in reality there is 4 GB. I made a 750 MB ramdrive swapfile and the PC is humming along quite nicely. I even picked up some points in some benchmarks. No blue screens, less HDD access. So far I believe that I have achieved what I wanted: more ram used with at least 3 GB for Win XP and programs to play in. I even put my temp files on the ramdrive so I never have to clean them out. I play a lot of memory thirsty games like FEAR and HL2 and not evn a glitch and shorter load times.

The testing continues but so far I couldn't be happier.

Tech