[RESOLVED] Opinion - At which amount of RAM would you disable Virtual Memory?

[Solkanar]

Hmm, in 98 I thought I was doing a good thing by disabling the VM with 512 megs. The pc runs great but I did it right away so I couldn't compare it to when VM is enabled. After reading this, maybe I will. With Win2K I tried to disable it and MS just goes and tells you it's needed. Oh, well, it's quick and all, how much faster did I need anyways?

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Everyone is entitled to make an occasional mistake..................except for skydivers of course.

[chip35]

I have switched windows 95 and 98 to no swap file temporarily in machines with as little as 64 meg of ram. This for the purpose of defragging the hard drive and only after disabling programs that autostart on boot. It worked just fine for that purpose and without a swap file, defragging goes faster without restarting nearly as much.Nt engine use the swap file for caching debug information when they crash (a necessary function for them). It wants to be equal to system memory plus a little when using the full debugging crash dump.

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What's the differance between 'twisted' and 'torqued' anyways?

[pumpkinhead77]

<font face="Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva" size="2">Originally posted by sowulo:
Perhaps solid state HD's will help....

</font>

Oh yeah.........Thats gonna kick @$$!

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If it's not broken....Fix it!
http://www.underauthority.net

[xt477]

I didnt see it posted anywhere sorry if this is a repeat, but why not make a ram disk and set your swap file to use it?

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Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent and reboot.
Order shall return.

[drewber]

On a 95 box you can cretae a large ram drive and tell it to place your swap file there, i wonder if that would work
?

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Luke, OBGYN Kanobi is the only one!!

[ReBoot]

Ramdrive: http://www.pcmech.com/showdoc/149/

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Who needs a life, I have Internet! Jim & Sue's Free Files | Jim's Modems | [email protected]

[Sowulo]

<font face="Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Geneva" size="2">Originally posted by sowulo:
I'll set it to 256 when I'm done with this session and let you know tomorrow. I had 1Gb of RAM in my system for awhile but used half in an emergency for something else. I couldn't see any difference in performance in anything I do so never bothered to replace it.

</font>

I did some monitoring at 256Mb and saw that my pagefile usage floated between 137 and 178, I guess that would explain why my system ran so bad with only 128Mb. Too bad that usage won't draw from the extra 305Mb RAM usually available.....

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Note to self: Re-index brain cells, database corruption present.

[Fubarian]

well, when you have a RAID array, yer swap file speed really isn't an issue....

[3D Prophet II]

I've only got 256MBs of PC2100 DDR with virtual memory set at a fixed 96MBs and my system runs great. Funny thing about that is that when I only had 128MBs, I had to have the page file set to 0 - 255MBs, who would've thunk of it. I have tried setting the virtual memory lower only to have very poor performance. I'd say just stick with what works best for "you", yeah that always works.

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"Oh my beloved Ice Cream Bar, how I love to lick your creamy center" - Ren

[ad3p4]

Winguides has an interesting registry tweak for Win2000.

I'm about to try it now.

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"Expect the unexpected"
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[MAYHEM]

I'm running 512MB of PC133 in my main machine. I have a couple Combat flight sims, Falcon 4.0, US Air Force and F/A18 that require at least 256 MB of Virtual memory. I can disable VMM and everything runs fine... EXCEPT those three programs. since I also have 120 GB of Hard drive space in the same machine, 512mb (Min and Max)of swap file doesn't kill me and the sims run fine. It also keeps my drives from fragmenting as much by limiting the size. And with it on the D: drive it doesn't bog other proceses.

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Well... I say... Nuke the unborn baby gay whales!

[Rejection Man]

I have 384 MB (system MAx) As a MCP i can tell you that over 256 MB make using the VM usless, and degrades system preformace. It not somuch windows having a problem with disabling VM but other programs. Win actualy runs 25% better with out VM, but MS office 2000 will not run becasue it is coded to goto VM forst (says thier is not enought Mem, but over 190 MB are free). the best aproach would be to create a ram drive over 128 MB ahd throw the swap in there to work around this problem.

ok using the ram drive to fool win dose not work, it is not a reconized drive. by trying to do this windows freaks out and crashes, reapeatedly (luckly developer tools save the system) how ever look like most of my sotware works with VM disabled at 384 MB.

[This message has been edited by Rejection Man (edited October 02, 2001).]

[ReBoot]

Even with a HUGE ramdrive, windows won't use it for the swap file, it just doesn't play well with other children
I create a 32 meg ramdrive on system startup (via autoexec.bat) and use it for my temp internet files. That way NOTHING is stored permanently. I also use it as an installation drive. Unzip files to it for install etc. Works good for that.
Swap is set to "let windows manage it" on a 98 system with 1 gig of RAM, and with the "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" line in system.ini (as well as the 512 limit of VCACHE), my swap never gets used, and the system is nice and fast.
On XP, who cares? XP manages RAM so much better, the system is actually faster than 98 on the same hardware. If I cut my RAM back to 256 meg, then 98 runs faster than XP...take a little, give a little, depending on what you use the system for.
Back to the original question, I would never actually disable VM (although you could), but Office won't run, as well as a few other progs (noted above), but I don't have Office, and don't play any games (OK, I do play Freecell a bit ) and can disable it with no ill effects. I would consider disabling it entirely at anything over 384 meg, but again, this depends on how much junk one has in startup.
The big box (black box) manufacturers seem to think we all need 27 programs residing in the taskbar "just in case" we might want to access one of them in a hurry (what a joke!). For those of us who know better, having 2 or 3 ONLY (Firewall, AV, whatever), can probably work all day, and not notice a slowdown.
Caveat: Winmodems will suck you dry, as will resident AV scanners (email protect, and other junk), in which case you'll probably NEED a swapfile of some size, as well as a periodic reboot to "get your system back".
Personal notes: I don't run a full time AV scanner, I start it when I want, then shut it off. I also have a hardware firewall (router) so I don't run ZA or similar. I do have my favorites though, TClockEx, DUMeter (broadband), and Push the Freakin' Button, are the ONLY things running, and I make sure of that by monitoring msconfig, and removing keys from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run, Run-, Runonce, and Runservices...

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Who needs a life, I have Internet! Jim & Sue's Free Files | Jim's Modems | [email protected]