Turn off Virtual Memory

[fefrie]

I just turned off virutal memory, and also set Memory Useage to system cache, and I noticed a significant speedup in application startup performance.

The biggest thing I noticed is that WMP9 starts up almost instantly, which is not the norm and videos played at 1080p don't bog down on it, and youtube seems to run with less of a stutter. Youtube used to like playing or loading, but not both.

It's almost like I've upgraded to a SSD, the change is that noticeable. This is pretty significant for me as I probably still have the original 5400rpm hard drive in it.

Granted, my computer is mostly used for web browsing and media management/playing, so your mileage may vary....

I recommend at least trying it.

I've got 2gb of ram running on XP on a t42 with 64mb video.

[MisterB]

Interesting. I've got almost the same setup-- a T42 MB with Radeon 9600 64mb vram in a T40 chasis. Generally Windows doesn't like virtual memory shut off but the last time I tried to shut off virtual memory was years ago.

I might try it in my T42P which also has 2Gb ram with FireGL 128mb vram. I tried an HD video I recorded from my satellite box to a USB drive the other night and it wouldn't play on my T40/T42 hybrid but I haven't tested it on the T42P yet. I didn't think this generation of GPUs could do HD video very well but the Radeon 9600 got close--just minor stuttering but it was mostly watchable.

[dr_st]

You cannot shut off virtual memory. What you can do is disable the pagefile.

What do you mean by setting memory usage to system cache?

[fefrie]

This is the setting that I have



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You can do your research and experiment on your own. But my experience with my web surfing and windows media player says that turning pagefile off/setting it to zero/turning of Virtual memory and setting priority to background processes has made the laptop seem much faster which is great for me. I just came back from the computer store and they had new laptops with wxga on them. Ugh, the low height resolution was tough to deal with. I'll need to keep this sxga laptop running for as long as I can.....

Generally, the more RAM you have, the simpler/less programs you run, the more likely you can benefit from turning off the paging file/virtual memory. The less I can have the HD as part of the equation, the better.

I use my laptop mostly for web surfing, so with my browser optimized to use as much ram as possible, and page filing turned off, it runs pretty quick. As I said before, the stuttering when watching a video as it was loading has been much reduced.

[dr_st]

I see.

The processor scheduling / memory usage settings may indeed have some interesting effects. Turning off the page file, though, is a placebo, as ancient as the concept of page file, and just as useless. Just for the fun, I did an experiment this morning - turning the page file off had exactly 0 effect on the speed at which WMP loaded (measured with a stopper several times). Of course, if people hear that it should be faster, they will sometimes feel that it's faster. I also don't rule out the possibilities that the other settings actually speed up the application loading.

Google "disable pagefile", first result:
http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understan ... disable-it