Virtual Memory - Help!!

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Guest

My PC runs at its limit sometimes - I have tried altering the virtual memory
but I am not exactly sure what I am doing. I wish my pc to use as much hard
drive memory as possible to save the RAM, I believe thats how it works
Any help would be greatfully received
 
Carl said:
My PC runs at its limit sometimes - I have tried altering the virtual
memory but I am not exactly sure what I am doing. I wish my pc to
use as much hard drive memory as possible to save the RAM, I believe
thats how it works
Click to expand...



No, you have it backwards. Saving the RAM is not a worthwhile objective.
Windows is designed to use, or almost all, of your RAM all the time, and
that's good, not bad. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You paid for all of it and
shouldn't want to see any of it go wasted.

Using the page file (hard drive) instead of RAM is *much* slower and will
severely impact your performance.

What does "My PC runs at its limit sometimes" mean?
 
Hello Carl:

Actually, you want your PC to use as much RAM as possible, since it's
much faster than the paging file on your hard disk. There is an old
expression that goes: unused RAM is wasted RAM.

For all but specialized applications, it's best to let Windows manage
virtual memory. Therefore the best setting for virtual memory is the
'system managed size'.

Here is a good introduction to virtual memory that will answer many
questions you may have:
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

Earl Grey
 
Carl

As the others have said it is better to use RAM before using virtual
memory.

How much RAM memory?Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task
Manager and click the Performance Tab. Under the Commit Charge what is
the Total,
the Limit and the Peak?

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
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