Can I get rid of my swap file?

[SickBeast]

My RAM seems wasted under XP. Is there a way to transfer my swap file to memory?

 

[Nothinman]

Go get yourself a copy of the book "Inside Windows", read the chapters on memory management and then you'll realize why your question makes no sense at all.

 

[Aluvus]

If I may borrow a line, Let It Be.

 

[Alone]

If you have 2GB of ram, you can spare the 500MB's of swap space. At least, I hope so. If not, then perhaps instead of that extra gig of ram, you should have bought a higher capacity hard drive.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Alone
If you have 2GB of ram, you can spare the 500MB's of swap space. At least, I hope so. If not, then perhaps instead of that extra gig of ram, you should have bought a higher capacity hard drive.

The extra ram makes a difference in games, especially when it comes to load times and multitasking. You should have 2GB with your CPU.

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Alone
If you have 2GB of ram, you can spare the 500MB's of swap space. At least, I hope so. If not, then perhaps instead of that extra gig of ram, you should have bought a higher capacity hard drive.

The extra ram makes a difference in games, especially when it comes to load times and multitasking. You should have 2GB with your CPU.

No I shouldn't.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
My RAM seems wasted under XP. Is there a way to transfer my swap file to memory?

If you have free memory, your swap file isn't being used.

 

[IEC]

You could disable the swap file entirely, but that's ill-advised. Just let it be. I recently upgraded to a dual core with 2GB of RAM and I have yet to notice the machine hit the pagefile.

 

[the Chase]

I saw no real diff with it off. Try it off and see (do some before and after load times, the "feel" of certain games,etc.). You can always turn it back on.

 

[Nothinman]

The extra ram makes a difference in games, especially when it comes to load times and multitasking. You should have 2GB with your CPU.

Adding or removing swap doesn't affect the total amount of physical memory available.

 

[drag]

My RAM seems wasted under XP.

You could..
A. Buy Vista and find new ways to use up that memory.
or
B. Be happy you have so much that you are worring about it going to waste.

The idea of having a swap file is that when you use your games and such that get performanjce boosts from having that much ram is that you can swap out parts of memory that aren't being used.

If you put your swap file in 512 meg ram disk you not only just blew 512 megs of real ram, but you just blew away 2 gigs of memory capacity and dramaticly reduced the efficiency of 512 megs worth of your 2 gigs of main memory.

In other words you just took 2 gigs of efficient memory, 4 gigs of total memory capacity (give or take) and reduced it to 1.5 gigs of efficient memory and 512 of somewhat less efficient memory.

If that doesn't make sense then you should do some research until it does.

Now that is not to say that that extra 2.5 gigs has benifit for you. It may not. There is a certain level of brokeness with XP and larges amounts of RAM and moving swap file to a ramdisk may help things out a bit, but I don't think that it's going to be bad enough to realy care about at this point.

 

[Tim Travis]

Not to divert the thread, but my wife's computer has 512 of ram and it is saying there is not enough virtua memory. What was the spec for setting a static page file? 2 times the ram? Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Not to divert the thread, but my wife's computer has 512 of ram and it is saying there is not enough virtua memory. What was the spec for setting a static page file? 2 times the ram? Thanks

There is no equation that will cover all uses. If she's getting that message then she really needs to get more memory or at the very least someone needs to profile her memory usage so that you can set the pagefile to a large enough size so that she won't see the message. Of course if she's seeing that message it means she's hitting the pagefile a lot and performance will be crap anyway.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Not to divert the thread, but my wife's computer has 512 of ram and it is saying there is not enough virtua memory. What was the spec for setting a static page file? 2 times the ram? Thanks

There is no equation that will cover all uses. If she's getting that message then she really needs to get more memory or at the very least someone needs to profile her memory usage so that you can set the pagefile to a large enough size so that she won't see the message. Of course if she's seeing that message it means she's hitting the pagefile a lot and performance will be crap anyway.

Yes, that and it sounds like her hard drive is full, which is not allowing Windows enough space to create the page file she needs.

512mb of RAM is not enough these days.

Tell her to delete some of her unneccessary stuff and see if that helps.

 

[Nothinman]

Yes, that and it sounds like her hard drive is full, which is not allowing Windows enough space to create the page file she needs.

Maybe, but unless someone went in and set it to System Managed after the initial install then probably not. For some brain-dead reason XP defaults to 1-1.5x non-system managed.

512mb of RAM is not enough these days.

Of course it is, depending on what you do with the system.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: SickBeast


512mb of RAM is not enough these days.

Tell that to the P4 1.4GHz 128MB/RAM with Xubuntu I'm posting this from. It's my parents' computer and they have no complaints

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: SickBeast


512mb of RAM is not enough these days.

Tell that to the P4 1.4GHz 128MB/RAM with Xubuntu I'm posting this from. It's my parents' computer and they have no complaints

Yep.
My parents are happily running XP on a 1.3 GHz Coppermine Celeron with 448 MB of RAM(odd number yeah, I just took some I had laying around and it turned out like that )

 

[Tim Travis]

The hard drive has 16 gigs free, that was the first thing I checked. Everything is running slow like it is out of space. Maybe i will just add some ram and see what happens