make Windows 2000 use ram first?

[ShawnD1]

i remember that Windows has some setting where you could make Windows use up ram before it would start using the pagefile. how do i do this in Windows 2000?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Physical ram and swap are for two different things. Kernel programmers know more than you, leave it alone, your computer is not slow.

 

[ShawnD1]

i know it's not slow but i have to test my ram to see if it's broken so i need more ram to be used. even if i run every piece of crap program on my computer, i can't get the ram use to go over 300mb

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

You're not trying hard enough

Open up an image editing program and create a new 10000x10000 pixel image, start adding layers, etc..

 

[asb002]

If you need to do a memory test, you could always use MemTest86
It makes a boot disk that checks your memory. Please note, it may take some time, but at least you'll know the memory is good

 

[ShawnD1]

i tried that program and it doesn't work. it runs the test then when it gets to 100% done, it starts over again. i had the thing running for 2 hours, the thing completed 4 times and it was still going.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
i tried that program and it doesn't work. it runs the test then when it gets to 100% done, it starts over again. i had the thing running for 2 hours, the thing completed 4 times and it was still going.

Um... that's what it's supposed to do. You can run it for as long as you like, just quit when you've had enough.

 

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
i tried that program and it doesn't work. it runs the test then when it gets to 100% done, it starts over again. i had the thing running for 2 hours, the thing completed 4 times and it was still going.

Um... that's what it's supposed to do. You can run it for as long as you like, just quit when you've had enough.

which also means your ram is fine

 

[Pseudodominion]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Physical ram and swap are for two different things. Kernel programmers know more than you, leave it alone, your computer is not slow.

This may be a true statement, but if he wants to play with it and learn then good. IMO they don't always know best either, but for the most part have it right for a typical user.

Here is what I have done in the past, but it is suggested that you have alot of memory(1GB or over for this)

First DL Msconfig for 2000
here.

then open it up and follow these steps.

go to the System.ini tab and click the + in front of the [386enh] tab. Now press new and add the following line:

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

Make your swapfile to have a fixed size. The rule for this is that the swapfile has to be 1.5/2 times your internal memory (don't count video ram into this). You can do this by pressing right mouse button on the my computer icon on your desktop. Now choose properties. In the advanced tab choose performance/settings - advanced - virtual memory/change and choose to make your own settings. Now make the swapfile 1.5/2 times the size of your internal memory. It's also wise to place the swapfile on the fastest drive in your system.

A good thing is to first delete the swapfile. Then defragment the destination drive and after that is done. Immediately add the swapfile to that drive.

Hope this is what yopu were looking for. This doesnt foce it to use all ram before PF but should use it less.

 

[Nothinman]

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

I believe this only works in Win9x.

Make your swapfile to have a fixed size

This will do absolutely nothing unless you're swapping a lot. And if you're swapping a lot and the pagefile can't expand you'll have allocations fail and things will crash. It's best to just let Windows manage it.

A good thing is to first delete the swapfile. Then defragment the destination drive and after that is done. Immediately add the swapfile to that drive.

This doesn't affect performance at all. Pagefile access isn't sequential, the amount of fragmentation of the pagefile doesn't affect performance because it only access the pagefile in page size (4K on 32-bit systems) chunks anyway.

Technically the pagefile should be in the dead center of your most used drive to cut down on seek time when it is necessary to access the pagefile.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
You're not trying hard enough

Open up an image editing program and create a new 10000x10000 pixel image, start adding layers, etc..

Hmmmm, I once did that....... It wasn't very speedy on my system...........

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

It's basically the same problem I have with gentoo fanboys that get all worked up about their super optimized kde installation. Whoop-dee-doo, it's not much, if any, difference in speed, and you're just wasting your time by being so concerned about something that will, at best, be a *somewhat noticeable* speed increase.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
It's basically the same problem I have with gentoo fanboys that get all worked up about their super optimized kde installation. Whoop-dee-doo, it's not much, if any, difference in speed, and you're just wasting your time by being so concerned about something that will, at best, be a *somewhat noticeable* speed increase.

I take it you're not much of a performance freak geek

 

[Nothinman]

I take it you're not much of a performance freak geek

You just have to know where to look for real performance gains, tweaking your pagefile is a really last resort, "I have nothing better to do" type of thing.

My workstation has 2 CPUs, 1.2G memory and 4 SCSI160 drives because those show a real improvement, f'ing with my swap partition on the other hand doesn't do much =)

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Spyro

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
It's basically the same problem I have with gentoo fanboys that get all worked up about their super optimized kde installation. Whoop-dee-doo, it's not much, if any, difference in speed, and you're just wasting your time by being so concerned about something that will, at best, be a *somewhat noticeable* speed increase.

I take it you're not much of a performance freak geek

I am just as much as anyone else (edit: I would have Nothinman's machine above if I wanted to dedicate my money to it ), but I hold it back because I am not willing to spend enough money to have the best of the best hardware. As far as software, it just seems silly to me to spend time chasing after miniscule, often theoretical, performance improvements.

 

[Pseudodominion]

It shouldnt need to expand if you make it a fixed size that is large. Which is why I say 1.5 time to 2 times the size of physical ram, and I said only do this for 1GB+ of ram. If this isnt enough PF then somethings wrong. I run this way with 1.5GB of RAM under XP and nothing has crashed.

and conservative tweak works under XP as I do this, and assume it works in 2000 provided you DL and use the MSconfig, as win2000 doesnt have it natively.


Edit: Also I must say what has been stated already, that I have notice no considerable gain from playing with these settings, and would agree it was/is a waste of time, but people should find out for themselves and evaluate on their own in these instances.

 

[Nothinman]

It shouldnt need to expand if you make it a fixed size that is large.

Which is a waste of disk space. It's safest to make the minimum as large as you think you'll need it and set the max unlimited for the odd case that you do need it. In normal usage you'll never notice anything because it won't need to expand and in the odd case something goes wrong you'll have pagefile space to spare and nothing will crash.

 

[drag]

. As far as software, it just seems silly to me to spend time chasing after miniscule, often theoretical, performance improvements.

Well your probably right, but I've just installed Gentoo and you do notice a different. For instance Mozilla starts in half the time it did before. I don't spend to much time tweaking everything, pretty much all I did was do the set the flags to compile only for a Athlon XP platform. That way all the programs that can use the extra tweaks built into the hardware. (mmx, mmx2, sse blah blah blah) Normally those things would be wasted on a normal installation were every thing is designed to be backward-compatable to the 486's. And since everything in Gentoo is automated so well I am not realy wasting my time compiling everything, since I have it do it while I am asleep or at work or enjoying life, or whatever. I think that compiling specificly for your hardware and getting rid of backward compatability of the binaries is were 90% of the performance boost (if any) you'll get from optimizing you gcc flags.

I think Gentoo people sometimes tend to over estimate the performance advantages of using gobs of optimization flags, which IMO just render your OS unstable. And of course there are other things I like about Gentoo other then the performance tweaking, which I keep to a minimum.

Of course if you got a nice OS going and don't realy have a reason to redo the installation, the percieved perfromance you gain alone is not worth the effort. For me it was a nasty power loss that fried the root partition of my poor Slackware installation.

 

[drag]

Oh, ya. I'd leave the memory settings alone. The best thing you can do for yourself is deleting the swap file and putting it on a seperate partition if you haven't already. If you don't already have a seperate partition, don't worry about it, it's not worth the risk you can get from using apps like partition magic.

You won't get any performance boost from that alone, but it will stop the page file from fragmenting the hell out of your system or program files if it has to fight for space.

 

[Nothinman]

The best thing you can do for yourself is deleting the swap file and putting it on a seperate partition if you haven't already. If you don't already have a seperate partition, don't worry about it, it's not worth the risk you can get from using apps like partition magic.

On a seperate physical drive yes, but not on a seperate partition. All you'll do is increase seek time needed to get to the pagefile.

You won't get any performance boost from that alone, but it will stop the page file from fragmenting the hell out of your system or program files if it has to fight for space.

Set the minimum size to something meaningfull and it won't ever expand.

 

[drag]

On a seperate physical drive yes, but not on a seperate partition. All you'll do is increase seek time needed to get to the pagefile.

I didn't say it would increase performance, the seek time is pretty much immaterial, because it's going to so freaking slow anyways... It's just to allow the page file to grow without worrying about it fighting for disk space with the regular files heavily fragmenting them and causing all sorts of hell. I figure having a lot of file writes at the same time as accessing the page file continously on the same partition would is like a fragmentation grenade for you harddrive. I suppose you could limit the size of the file though.

 

[Nothinman]

the seek time is pretty much immaterial, because it's going to so freaking slow anyways...

seek time is the biggest problem, if you're going to try and reduce anything it'll be seek time.

It's just to allow the page file to grow without worrying about it fighting for disk space with the regular files heavily fragmenting them and causing all sorts of hell. I figure having a lot of file writes at the same time as accessing the page file continously on the same partition would is like a fragmentation grenade for you harddrive. I suppose you could limit the size of the file though.

Set the minimum size to something reasonable and you won't have to worry about the pagefile expanding.

 

[Pseudodominion]

Here's a guide I usually follow. I was looking for this link in my original post but never found it. Pagefile guide.


heres another good one here