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How much RAM should you have so you can turn off disk swapping?

H

Hoeboy

Banned
I'm running WinME on a P4 1.6a w/ 256mb pc2100 and after awhile, it starts to get really slow. I'm guessing it's because of disk swapping. It also starts to lag when I multi-task with Adobe PS, Premiere, IE, and Movie Maker opened. How much RAM do you guys recommend so I can take off disk swapping?
 
Don't use WinME for a start. Memory management in WinME is arguably worse than Win98SE. For what you are doing, it's best to go with Win2K or WinXP, and then get at least 512MB of RAM.

I don't recommend turning off disk paging, no matter how much RAM you have, as there are programs which require the use of virtual memory.
 
Hm. I've swapped OS a couple of times already and I'm in no mood to really swap again. I wanna finish this project first before switching to Win2k. I just really hate having to install everything again 🙁
 
In WIN2K, I monitored the mem usage and it never hit over 300MB, so I disabled disk swapping when I had 512 MB. I think you can do it with 384MB, too.
 


<< I don't recommend turning off disk paging, no matter how much RAM you have, as there are programs which require the use of virtual memory. >>



Pretty much. If you get an OS with good memory management on there (2k or XP), you still don't want to turn off the page file. Because 2k and XP are so much more intelligent in the way they manage memory, its really not an issue unless you are, for some reason, convinced that disabling the page file will give you huge performance gains (which it won't...at least not on 2k and XP)
 
I can't belive you're complaining that it swaps with PC, Premiere, IE and Movie Maker open when you only have 256Mb!
Doing anything serious with only PS, my machine with 512Mb running XP swaps to disk.

The bottom line is; if it's swapping to disk you're out of memory. And you therefore need virtual memory to stop your programs crashing.

If you have enough ram to turn off disk swapping, your machine will never swap to disk anyway because it won't run out of memory.

There is no benefit to turning it off. Just upgrade your ram if you want to be able to multitask like that.
 
I'm still using a pagefile within XP also and I got 768mb of ram. I done some tweaking to the system and got it to use only about 90mb of ram at bootup. So I went and made a 200mb ram-drive which comes in handy. I did try a 300mb ram drive and loaded UT on it and boy does the game loads real fast 😀
 
Hm. I guess I'll just get some more RAM. I was using WInXP before and never had problems like this but my AIW 7500 keeps crashing in XP. One thing that I'm am uncertain about is whether or not this is a memory issue. If I leave my computer on for the entire day, by the end of the day, it'll get sluggish, even after I closed every program possible. A reboot solves the problem though. If only memory prices are low like they were last year, I'd be in with one gig of ram right now 🙁
 
If you add

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

in the [386Enh] section of your system.ini file it will make ME only use the swapfile when it needs to like in Win98. By default it tries to anticipate when it needs to hit the swapfile, something it doesn't do very well.
 
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