How should I use my new memory?...

[Booty]

I couldn't resist buying some more memory with prices so low, so I picked up a gig of crucial pc133 cas2 to split between my computers. Originally, I was just gonna sell my old generic ram and put 512 megs in each computer, but then I started reading stuff about the conservativeswapfileusage=1 setting...anyway, to make a long story short, I'm wondering how much ram I should leave in my system, and what can be done with it to improve performance. I could have up to 896 mb in the computer in my main computer (the other will have 256 or 384)...what purposes could a ramdrive serve in the main system? I'm using win9x (for gaming) and am *not* going to switch to 2k, so PLEASE don't try to convince me to. I'm sure some of you will still be stubborn and insist on at least mentioning this, but please just don't waste your time because at this point I'm not going to switch. Please keep this in mind...I was thinking of setting up a relatively large ramdrive to use as the swapfile as well as maybe a cache for web browsing. Will this speed things up a little (not expecting a huge increase)? How should I go about doing this? Any suggestions are very welcome, EXCEPT to try to get me to switch to 2k because I'm just not going to do that at this point. Thanks...

 

[pjs]

Use your new memory to remember things!!!

Seriously, I have heard (no personal experience here, though) that Win9x has problems with memory management in systems that have over 512MB of memory. Based on this, I would say to spread the wealth ... er ... memory around, with none of the windows 9x systems having more than 512MB of memory.

Or you can really load one system up and just see what happens.

Paul

 

[wyldebill]

i found a ramdrive a while back. it was mentioned in an article about how using a ramdrive with quake3 installed would load faster = get you into the level faster = give an advantage in getting items.

for the record, i used it a couple times in lan games and it did load faster than other players.

i'll see if i can find the link again....

wb

 

[igiveup]

Uh, one quick point here. If you just bought CAS 2 memory you might want to pull all of the current memory out of two of your favorite computers and give them the straight CAS 2 RAM. If you throw it in a system that doesn't have CAS 2 that nice RAM you bought will not be able to use the better timings. Sort of a weakest link thing. Then again, if you know about RAM and what CAS means I am sure that I am just babling cause you know this already. Man, hard to believe how cheap RAM is now. "Just picked up a GIG of RAM". Thank god for capitalism and the free market.

Why the Anti-Windows 2000 stance? Well, your choice I guess.

 

[Booty]

yeah, I know about the cas stuff...the generic stuff can do cas 2 as well. I'm not really 'anti-2k'...it's just that I'm not going to be switching at this point for a number of reasons that I won't bore you with. Lots of members of this forum post the most worthless replies I've ever read...they don't read the entire original message and will suggest things that the originator has already tried, or they'll offer up suggestions like "buy a new one" when it's obvious that the originator knows that this is an option and would rather work with the current, uh, whatever it is. Anyway, I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't want to read a bunch of "switch to 2k" responses...I want to stick with 9x for now. If I didn't make that clear, I'm sure that "switch to 2k" would've been posted 5 times by now.

//edit

I can't believe the prices of ram now either...I would have never thought I'd purchase a gig of ram...I remember a couple years ago when I built a system for my girlfriend with 256 megs and the ram alone cost $600+. I bought 4 times that for $250. Insane.

 

[LoStZ]

I think if you do a search on Microsoft's site you'll find some info on some settings or so to make 9x/ME work with more than 512MB. I currently have only 256MB, but just saw a deal for 3 sticks of 256 which I could not resist (though I've been holding on all this time). So I'm gonna have to do a search for some info on that myself

 

[xWeston]

Use more than 512 ram in win9x

Click that link for micrososfts workaround (found in the new FAQ section of anand)

 

[TunaBoo]

Make a 512 meg swap drive, and have a 512 meg swap file on it.

Should let you work around the win9x ram issues, not sure if better or worse the using it all and getting patches from microsoft.