Thinkpads Forum

so I have Vista 32 with 4gb ram and 1gb ramdisk. i am currently running my IE8 from it, which seems to be faster than both chrome and portable FF. how else can i put that extra 1gb of space into good use?

Move your paging file to the ramdisk.

Using a RAM disk for a pagefile (in effect, using actual memory to create virtual memory) isn't of any benefit - you may as well just use the actual memory for what it is. It'd be identical to simply using all the RAM, and have neither a RAM disk nor a pagefile set up.

The only caveat is if you have "inaccessible" RAM on your computer, e.g. >3.5GB of RAM under a 32-bit OS. There is RAM disk software about on Windows that lets you use the inaccessible (>3.5GB) part of the memory map as a RAM disk - using this for swap space would be useful, as that RAM is useless for anything else.

rek wrote:The only caveat is if you have "inaccessible" RAM on your computer, e.g. >3.5GB of RAM under a 32-bit OS.

Which, if I read the OP correctly, is the case here. 4GB installed memory under Vista 32. 0.5GB is being "wasted" on the ramdisk but that's not too bad. If you are running so many processes or bloated programs as to be using up 3GB+ of memory, then you've got other problems .

I was going to suggest moving any temporary directory onto the ramdrive as well. "c:\temp" or "c:\windows\temp" comes to mind. It was a very popular trick back in the days of the Cromenco system I used for awhile.

hmmm, i thought that 32bit OS was only capable of using 3 out of 4gb. how do you guys get 3.5gb?

rek wrote:Using a RAM disk for a pagefile (in effect, using actual memory to create virtual memory) isn't of any benefit - you may as well just use the actual memory for what it is. It'd be identical to simply using all the RAM, and have neither a RAM disk nor a pagefile set up.

Sure he can just turn off the paging file but I know I would be more comfortable with keeping a small paging file and then just moving that to the ramdisk - just to avoid any potential issues.

i use my X300 for school, mostly viewing PDF files and powerpoint presentations and occasionally playing some music;
with 4gb of ram there is simply no point for a pagefile.
here is what i did so far:
- i changed location of temporary internet files for almost all of my browsers (it was impossible for chrome)
- i changed windows temporary folder location
i tried changing location of the user profile but it does not seem to register. applications such as adobe flash player and picasa are persistent to write into my C drive.

mattbiernat wrote:i use my X300 for school, mostly viewing PDF files and powerpoint presentations and occasionally playing some music;
with 4gb of ram there is simply no point for a pagefile.
here is what i did so far:
- i changed location of temporary internet files for almost all of my browsers (it was impossible for chrome)
- i changed windows temporary folder location
i tried changing location of the user profile but it does not seem to register. applications such as adobe flash player and picasa are persistent to write into my C drive.

Changed the location to where?

visionviper wrote:
Changed the location to where?

ramdisk