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i was reading black vipers webpage (think its his name) and he said if you have around 2gb of ram you could get away with no virtual memory, which would speed things up. i was wonder if anyone had no virtual memory, and how much ram they have and how there system responds. since all im going to be using is basically gbpvr, i was wondering if i could get away with this with around 1gb ram or 1.5gb ram (1gbram is quite expensive, and i only got 2 ram slots on my motherboard, 512 is kinda cheap, in nz that is).

at moment i got it set to 1000 megs inital and max which does help, but only got 256meg ram at moment.

That is not entirely correct, your PC can not do without virtual memory, what it can do without is the swap file, the two are not entirely the same thing. with 256Mb of ram you should only need a swap file with an initial size of about 200Mb and a max of 700-800, making min and max the same size does not in fact have any great benefit in terms of performance. (obviously your max size will be dependant on what you do with your machine, and watching large video files is one thing that would make it need more.)

The only think you can do to improve the swap file performance is to put it on a drive smaller than 8Gb, then it will have a 4K cluster size which is the same as internal memory page file.

The thing with windows is that the more physical ram you put in it the better windows will behave, for windows XP and 2K you should work on having a minimum of 512Mb, but 768Mb would be better, windows will use as much ram as it finds, but for normal usage between 768-1024 is about right, anymore than that and you will be wasting your money most of the time as you won't ever use the extra ram, obviously there are a few exceptions to this, but for general usage more than 1Gb of ram is a waste.

black viper (he knows his stuff) said, and i have noticed a great performance increase (its obivious why), that if you set the inital and the max at the same size, and a large size this will increase performance, windows often says "virtual memory is low, increasing virtual memory size, system performance way suffer at this time" (not word for word, but you get the idea). so if initial and max is same size, this doesnt occur, which is nice, and i thought, he said it somewhere, by making it so windows doesnt have the option for virtual memory (since its just virtual ram window uses but way slower) and instead just using ram (lots of ram, he recommends 2gb) this can increase performance.

the memory im talking about is under system properties\performance options\virtual memory and it has the option for "no paging file", i cant find an option for no swap file.

im just try to tweak the crap out of my machine, you know how it is

I also know my stuff
Setting the initial and max to the same size will have very little benefit. paging file=swap file.

if you get virtual memory low warnings then your initial/max sizes were incorrect in the first place, you can still get these warnings if min/max were the same.

basically once you get past the 512Mb barrier windows will need less paging file because it has more ram, but like I said for most users (unless you use photoshop for editing lots of large files) more than 1024 is a total waste because you will not use it and will see very little if any performance increase between using 1Gb and 2Gb ( you will see a massive difference between 256Mb and 1Gb though).

Just get more ram, no amount of tweeaking is going to get past the fact you only have 256Mb of ram

yeah im planning on getting more ram, just trying to get the best performance possible, thanks for the advice, ill just get 1gb (2x 512 about 2/3 the price of 1x1gb) (ddr 400, my motherboard dont suppor the new stuff, well i dont think its does (533mhz or whatever the speed is)). but i have noticed way better performace with inital and max being the same size (its probably just because the inital size is so large (1000megs), before i always got that "window is increaing paging file blah blah blah" which was a pain).

[b Wrote:Quote[/b] ](its probably just because the inital size is so large (1000megs),

yes, that is the reason.

with 1Gb you should be able to set your paging file to something like 100Mb min and 700Mb max, The fact that you have 1Gb of ram should mean that it doesn't use the paging file most of the time anyway.

I'm one of those theoretical people that actually has 2GB of RAM in another system. How big should my page file be?

The same would apply for 2Gb, set a minimum of 100Mb and a max of about 700Mb or less.

I also have 2Gb of RAM in this machine, but it is my Dev box and has MS SQL, FireBird SQL, MySQL, IIS, .NET, Delphi7, C#Builder, photoshop, several IE windows, firefox and god knows what else running on it all the time, I don't have much free ram , if it's free then your just wasting it

[b Wrote:Quote[/b] ]Setting the initial and max to the same size will have very little benefit. paging file=swap file.

It relieves the OS from having to manage the size of the swap file, since its size is static. If the swap file is dynamic, growing the file takes time, and may lead to a fragmented swap file, which may decrease performance if lots of swapping is going on.

Barry