I upgrade my memory on my 64bit XP to 16 gigs..

[Papagayo]

I upgraded my machine to 16 gigs on my 64-bit XP. Do you think it would be better to turn off the swap files?

I do some video converting, but mostly use it for games..

TF2, UT3, Hellgate..


Thanks

 

[Crusty]

The only thing I might do with that much ram is drop the size down a little bit, but never turn it off!

FWIW on Vista 64 w/ 8GB of RAM I haven't touched the swap file and see no reason too. Windows is smart enough to know how to effectively use your RAM + swap file believe it or not 😛

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: Papagayo
I upgraded my machine to 16 gigs on my 64-bit XP. Do you think it would be better to turn off the swap files?

I do some video converting, but mostly use it for games..

TF2, UT3, Hellgate..


Thanks

Use half or even 12 GB of it as a ram drive. Just install your OS and applications on it sense most games would barely fit on it. Maybe that is not possible though. I better idea is use half to of the ram to use as your swap drive. Point it to there instead of somewhere on your hard drive. Should make your whole pc speed up.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Never turn off a SWAP area on the HDD. Some programs depend on a SWAP drive regardless of whether it is used or not. If you really don't want much - then make it a static size of something ridiculous like 512MB.

-Kevin

 

[Mem]

I would just let Windows OS manage the swap size,so basically leave it alone.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: pcslookout

Originally posted by: Papagayo
I upgraded my machine to 16 gigs on my 64-bit XP. Do you think it would be better to turn off the swap files?

I do some video converting, but mostly use it for games..

TF2, UT3, Hellgate..


Thanks

Use half or even 12 GB of it as a ram drive. Just install your OS and applications on it sense most games would barely fit on it. Maybe that is not possible though. I better idea is use half to of the ram to use as your swap drive. Point it to there instead of somewhere on your hard drive. Should make your whole pc speed up.

Mmmm RAM Drive... eat that WD Velociraptor!

Is it possible to easily set up a RAM drive anymore? I remember seeing an expansion card years ago, that had SATA2 port on it and like 8 RAM slots... but it may have been DDR only.

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: TheStu

Originally posted by: pcslookout

Originally posted by: Papagayo
I upgraded my machine to 16 gigs on my 64-bit XP. Do you think it would be better to turn off the swap files?

I do some video converting, but mostly use it for games..

TF2, UT3, Hellgate..


Thanks

Use half or even 12 GB of it as a ram drive. Just install your OS and applications on it sense most games would barely fit on it. Maybe that is not possible though. I better idea is use half to of the ram to use as your swap drive. Point it to there instead of somewhere on your hard drive. Should make your whole pc speed up.

Mmmm RAM Drive... eat that WD Velociraptor!

Is it possible to easily set up a RAM drive anymore? I remember seeing an expansion card years ago, that had SATA2 port on it and like 8 RAM slots... but it may have been DDR only.

.. won't work well since you have to load stuff to RAM drive every time you boot up.

if you say ha! I won't reboot ever, then superfetch does that (loading most used stuff into RAM) already in Vista.

 

[Papagayo]

Thanks for the input..

 

[Nothinman]

Use half or even 12 GB of it as a ram drive. Just install your OS and applications on it sense most games would barely fit on it.

It might be possible with a lot of work, but you'd need one OS to setup the ramdisk and copy the second to it and then hand off boot control to the second. With Linux it would probably be fairly simple but I'm not even sure how you could trick Windows into letting you do that. And you'd still need to have your pre-boot OS copy all of that data from some permanent storage so there goes your boot times.

I better idea is use half to of the ram to use as your swap drive. Point it to there instead of somewhere on your hard drive. Should make your whole pc speed up.

Worst idea ever...

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Use half or even 12 GB of it as a ram drive. Just install your OS and applications on it sense most games would barely fit on it.

It might be possible with a lot of work, but you'd need one OS to setup the ramdisk and copy the second to it and then hand off boot control to the second. With Linux it would probably be fairly simple but I'm not even sure how you could trick Windows into letting you do that. And you'd still need to have your pre-boot OS copy all of that data from some permanent storage so there goes your boot times.

I would try it if I had 8 GB or even 16 GB of ram just to see if the amount of speed difference was worth it or not.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Sorry, a little off topic...

I used to have a 1.5 MB RAM Amiga with a 68000 at 14.2 MHz, running the OS and a C compiler on a 512 KB RAM disk. Yes. Reboots were freakin' instantaneous. So long as I didn't shut the system off, I had an incredibly responsive system to study C/C++ on. Nothing I've seen since comes close, even now.

If I were a developer, I'd simply have an automatic RAM disk set up on that box with all my compilers and interpreters running, and simply use that for compiling and running. But swap files? Leave 'em alone.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: Dadofamunky
Sorry, a little off topic...

I used to have a 1.5 MB RAM Amiga with a 68000 at 14.2 MHz, running the OS and a C compiler on a 512 KB RAM disk. Yes. Reboots were freakin' instantaneous. So long as I didn't shut the system off, I had an incredibly responsive system to study C/C++ on. Nothing I've seen since comes close, even now.

If I were a developer, I'd simply have an automatic RAM disk set up on that box with all my compilers and interpreters running, and simply use that for compiling and running. But swap files? Leave 'em alone.

That's really a moot point nowadays with the speed and stability of the hardware. Most computers you hardly have to reboot, and everything else is fast enough where I never notice compile time anymore unless I'm building something huge 🙂

 

[Nothinman]

I would try it if I had 8 GB or even 16 GB of ram just to see if the amount of speed difference was worth it or not.

Well I believe you'd need to start with a copy of WinPE or embedded Windows to even think about getting it to run from a RAM drive. And even then WinPE boots from a normal device and just caches to the RAM drive so you'd have some work to do before you could get it to copy everything over and run directly from the RAM drive. Then you have to worry about whether or not it supports XIP otherwise you'll end up with 2 copies of everything that you run in memory.

If I were a developer, I'd simply have an automatic RAM disk set up on that box with all my compilers and interpreters running, and simply use that for compiling and running.

With the way that current compilers cache results, only build what's necessary on a rebuild and the OS caches all file reads it's largely a moot point. You might see some benefits on your first few runs but after that most everything should be cached in memory anyway.