Speed Demon - I'M MOVING NOW!!

[Purcy]

Got my two sticks of IBM 256MB RAM today and inserted them, and away we go This beauty booted in about 40 seconds, down from the normal 3 minutes. Wow, what double the RAM will do. The eBay seller I got them from still had about 15 sticks left for $34.99 (name is worldrecycler). I see that auction ended, but if you are interested you could email him.

[Musti]

Got my two sticks of IBM 256MB RAM today and inserted them, and away we go This beauty booted in about 40 seconds, down from the normal 3 minutes. Wow, what double the RAM will do. The eBay seller I got them from still had about 15 sticks left for $34.99 (name is worldrecycler). I see that auction ended, but if you are interested you could email him.

Nice!
Make sure you optimize your swap file for the new memory configuration also. Give me a shout if you don't know how, and enjoy the newly breathed extra memory life!

[Purcy]

I'm shouting for you Musti, I don't even know what a swap file is
Wow, what I have learned here in the past two months! Amazing. Thank you for your help.

[Musti]

you got mail.

[rscosworth]

shouting for Musti's instructions also

[joester]

HEY MUSTI!!!

HEY MUSTI!!!!
Me too!
Joe

[Musti]

Hello folks

This is the bulk of the message I sent to purcy, a bit edited...hope it is useful.

Swap is also called Virtual Memory (actually it should be called Virtual Physical Memory, or Virtually Physical Memory...you'll see in a bit)

In very basic terms, it is the part of your hard disk that is used as extra memory, in addition to your physical memory (those new sticks you purchased) so that Windows can trick itself and applications into believing they have more memory than your physical memory.

If this sounds complicated, here's another try:

Say you have 256 MB physical memory (one stick)
And you set your swap to 1 MB.

Windows acts and makes the system and the applications to think that altogether they have 257 MB memory. That way an application that asks for 257 MB memory will not be denied access to system resources and will be run.

The reason the whole system speeds up with added physical memory is less of the hard disk is used as virtual memory, and more of the physical is used, as more is available.

Why? To follow the below argument, you have to realize physical memory access is much faster than accessing your hard drive, no matter how fast your hard drive is.

When you minimize an application, or don't use it for an extended period of time, (we are talking about ideal, well-behaving applications), the memory that is occupied by that app is taken from the physical memory and swapped into virtual memory, so more physical memory is made available for an upcoming app or the overall system.

If you have less than ideal physical memory (which for many is 256 MB for an average Windows XP setup) that is why you see the delay and the hard drive activity when you switch between the applications. The more physical, fast memory you have, the faster (or even not existent) that switch will be.

---

Virtual memory optimization is all subjective. Ask 40 different people and you'll get 40 different settings. Some setup the virtual memory 1.5 times their physical memory, some 1X, and some 1/2 X. It really doesn't matter (see footnote 1) as long as the size of the virtual memory is held constant, it is the shrinkage/expansion that puts extra strain on the hard drive. Another thing is to keep it always enabled, even if you have 2 GB memory, because Windows for some reason performs better when there's virtual memory, no matter how small. For example, on systems with 1 GB memory (twice your size or mine), I set virtual memory to a mere 50 MB just to keep the system happy.


Let's set your virtual memory manually, and let's set it to 768 MB, and let's make it static (in other words, it will always be 768).

So, right click on My Computer, select Properties.
Advanced tab
Under Performance, click Settings
Click Advanced tab
Make sure Programs are checked for the first two settings (Processor scheduling, and Memory usage)
For the third setting, click Change
Make sure C is highlighted in drives mini-window
Now look slightly below, you'll see three options
Custom size
System managed size
No paging file.

Click Custom size
in both of the boxes, put 768, and right after that, click Set
Click OK

Windows will warn you that you'll need to reboot. Do so.

You're done!

Go back to the Virtual Memory settings, and check them. Both boxes should read 768 MB

Just take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_me ... ws_example

and this is straight from Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417/


There's also a little difference in terminology, swapping versus paging. In paging, the memory allocation of an app is divided into memory pages, and some, sometimes all of those pages are transfered into virtual memory. In swapping, all of the memory occupied by the app is transfered. Paging is what is used by Windows XP, though they are sometimes used synonymously.


(1) Well, I kinda lied. It does matter, when the system starts giving out of memory errors and/or when there's too much swapping while the system tries to keep up with your app switching demands. But setting it 1.5X your physical memory size should work for most users.