Question about RAM, page file, and what benefits will be had to adding more RAM to a Win2000 machine

[Spoooon]

I'm about to go to the FedEx place to pick up my new stick of 128meg PC133 RAM. That will bring my total to 256. My questions are: what benefits will I notice? Also, should I change the size of the pagefile? From what I understand, the whole point of having a pagefile (swapfile) is so that if you don't have enough RAM to run an app, it'll start swapping with the pagefile. So, with more RAM, shouldn't my pagefile be smaller? Or atleast the same size as before? Thanks in advance...

 

[GT1999]

Without getting into all of the technical aspects of why NT [Win2000] likes more RAM, let's just say that there's a lot more features in the OS compared to Win9x. These features and other services take up gobs of RAM. Depending on the applications you run and the memory requirements it has you will most likely run over your physical capacity of RAM if you only have 64~128, which will force the operating system to turn to the virtual memory [page file] located on the hard drive. This will obviously create a slowdown since it will be accessing the HD more than usual - which is why you buy more RAM.

So I hope that answers your question; you'll notice less disk swapping.

Edit: As for the pagefile, you can leave that the way it is and it'll be fine, but I'd recommend increasing it a tad, depending on what you have it at now. Some people say Physical RAM * 1.5 and others like less/more. Make sure you have a fixed page file; something that Windows does not do by default. Be sure to defragment before you adjust the size..

 

[Spoooon]

I did most of the stuff except for defragging the drive. One thing about the pagefile: an article at Rojak Pot talked about how it didn't make sense increasing the pagefile size as you increase RAM. If you had 512 megs of RAM, do you make the pagefile 1 gig? I went ahead and left it as it was and everything seems good. Everything on the whole feels a tad quicker. Win2000 rocks.

 

[Flighttester]

I have two super 7 systems, both identical Epox motherboards, with 2 Mb cache on the MoBo, AMD K6-III/450 Processor, VooDoo 3/3000 Graphics and Windows 2000. One currently has 256Meg, the other has 128Mb Ram. Running Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 Professional shows no measurable difference in speed. Maybe it might if I had other background stuff loaded at the same time. Extra memory above 128 Mb will only help if you are running programs that use that much RAM. Some do, most don't. Watch the task manager while you are running your most stressful programs. If it pages out to virtual memory, you would be served by extra RAM. Otherwise, it won't help much if at all.