Running on no virtual memory...

[acesea]

how much ram would one need to disable virtual memory (using hd as an extra storage for ram- emulating hd as ram). 1 gig? more? would there be a big performance gain in doing so? does anyone here control the setting of their virtual memory? thanks

[JigPu]

For amounts OVER 512MB, it is usually safe to disable the swap file. I don't know about any perfomance gains, though logically there should be some (at least minor) gains.

Technically however, as long as you never fully use your memory, you are also safe disabling your swap file. For example, on my old system I had 192MB of RAM, and NEVER had less than 50MB free even with all things I would ever open running. I could have safely disabled the swap file on that system, though I decided to keep a small one (100MB) just in case in the future I installed some program that acually used the rest of my memory.


If you do decide to keep your swapfile, a recomendation I could make for the size would be the maximum you use. Monitor your swapfile usage while opening programs, and open more programs than you think you would have open at once. Once you believe that your computer is running the most programs you would ever realistically run at once, check your swapfile usage and add 100MB. Use this figure as your swapfile, or 100MB if you never touched the thing throughout the process. That's what I've allways used, and I've never ran out of memory!

JigPu

[cack01]

I have yet to ever use 512MB of ram at a time. So I guess if you have 512 or higher you should be safe. I don't recommend getting rid of/disabilling virtual memory. If memory serves me corectly, some games and programs specifically write to your virtual memory even if you have enough RAM. I could be wrong on this.

But realistically I don't think you will "see" any improvement at all in proformance.

[pauldriver]

Win NT (W2k and XP) requires a minimum of a 64K page file.

[Caffinehog]

Somewhere, there is a conservative swap file registry edit that puts everything into ram until you run out of space if you have windows 98. Do a search for windows 98 registry tweaks on yahoo or something.