virtual memory

[Gordon Biggar]

I write a lot of Word programs (Office 2000) in which I am inserting photos,
etc. Of late, I am receiving virtual memory warnings, the system saying
that I am low on virtual memory, and that it is going to have to increase
same. My programs are not terminated, however.

I have a 200 gig hard drive (C with 260 MB of RAM. There is 87% free
space, and my Word files are only a few meg, or so, in size. Virtual memory
on my C drive is set for 400-450 MB.

I read in the HELP section that the pagefile.sys should preferably not be
located on the same drive with other system files. Since I have another
hard drive (E: 4 gig free), I set up a file on that drive (450-500 MB). I
have not had the problem since, but somehow this seems like a great waste of
system resources.

Should the pagefile on the C drive be set to zero? Or, is something else
creating the virtual memory warnings?

Thanks in advance for all comments.

Regards,

Gordon Biggar
Houston, Texas

 

[philo]

I write a lot of Word programs (Office 2000) in which I am inserting photos,
etc. Of late, I am receiving virtual memory warnings, the system saying
that I am low on virtual memory, and that it is going to have to increase
same. My programs are not terminated, however.

I have a 200 gig hard drive (C with 260 MB of RAM. There is 87% free
space, and my Word files are only a few meg, or so, in size. Virtual memory
on my C drive is set for 400-450 MB.

I read in the HELP section that the pagefile.sys should preferably not be
located on the same drive with other system files. Since I have another
hard drive (E: 4 gig free), I set up a file on that drive (450-500 MB). I
have not had the problem since, but somehow this seems like a great waste of
system resources.

Should the pagefile on the C drive be set to zero? Or, is something else
creating the virtual memory warnings?

Thanks in advance for all comments.

Regards,

Gordon Biggar
Houston, Texas

I'd put it back on the same drive as your OS
but set the maximum size up to perhaps 800 megs

BTW: it would not hurt to bump your RAM up to at least 512 megs

 

[DL]

Peoples have all sorts of technical opinions on the page file location, but
I must confess I've not seen any MS reccomendation that the page file be
located on seperate hd to the system.
Generally the page file should be set to system managed, and generally has a
max size is 1.5*ram
BTW as philo states bumping up your ram to 512mb would likely lead to a
wonderous result.
260mb ram? do you have onboard graphics which is utilising sys ram?
Also is your file system NTFS?

 

[John John (MVP)]

Configuring paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows Server
2003, in Windows 2000, and in Windows NT
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197379/

John

 

[Gordon Biggar]

Thanks for your very prompt response.

Technical question: the HELP section says to avoid placing pagefile.sys on
the same hard drive as one's system files. I would imagine that the vast
majority of users only have one hard drive, but where there may be a second
drive, your comment implies that you nonetheless prefer to place it on the
same drive as where the system files are located.

What might be your rationale, or might your response be too technical for a
non-tech to comprehend? !

Thanks again.

GGB

 

[DL]

ta

Configuring paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows Server
2003, in Windows 2000, and in Windows NT
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197379/

John

 

[philo]

Configuring paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows Server
2003, in Windows 2000, and in Windows NT
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197379/

I'd say to go with what the article said.

However:
I've run some experiements to see if it made any difference which drive the
pagefile
was on and could not see any noticible difference

I suggested you put the page file on the same drive as you OS
because you seem to have very little free space on your 2nd drive...

If you had more free space there, I would have told you to just leave it
where it is, but simply increase the size

At any rate, for best results you should see about adding soem RAM

 

[John John (MVP)]

I'd say to go with what the article said.

However:
I've run some experiements to see if it made any difference which drive the
pagefile
was on and could not see any noticible difference

Don't put it on an IDE drive that is in a slave relationship with a busy
disk or on a disk that is in a slave relationship to the system disk,
data can only flow to one disk at a time on the IDE controller. Also,
if you have a sufficient amount of RAM you may not notice significant
differences because there might no be much paging anyway. But it does
make make a big difference when there is a lot of paging, that is
something that folks with NT4 experience are well aware of, in the NT4
era RAM was expensive and it was often a scarce resource, paging could
often be a constant drag on performance and moving the pagefile to a
different disk on a different controller often led to very noticeable
performance improvements.

I suggested you put the page file on the same drive as you OS
because you seem to have very little free space on your 2nd drive...

If you had more free space there, I would have told you to just leave it
where it is, but simply increase the size

At any rate, for best results you should see about adding soem RAM

Agreed, at today's prices (RDRAM aside) RAM is quite cheap and adding
more RAM should reduce paging and lead to a very noticeable increase in
performance.

John

 

[Gordon Biggar]

I continue to be amazed by the amount of knowledge willingly expressed in
forums such as these.

Please accept my apologies for the delay in my response to your helpful
comments. (I'm still slingin' mud in the Galveston area, so life is not yet
quite back to normal.)

Obviously, the overwhelming suggestion is to increase RAM. Stupid question,
but can this best be purchased online through storage (?) vendors, or do I
need to find a store specializing in computer sales/repairs?

The article referenced by John John appears to lean in the direction of
using a separate drive. Since my second drive (E was simply replaced with
my present, larger C: drive, does this make the E: drive a "slave," which
would argue for leaving the pagefile on the C: drive? (I do not use the E:
drive at all.)

In answer to DL's questions, the file system is NTFS; do not know whether I
have "onboard graphics."

Again, many thanks for the efforts expended to solve my problem.

Gordon Biggar
Houston, Texas



..

 

[John John (MVP)]

See inline:

I continue to be amazed by the amount of knowledge willingly expressed in
forums such as these.

Please accept my apologies for the delay in my response to your helpful
comments. (I'm still slingin' mud in the Galveston area, so life is not yet
quite back to normal.)

Obviously, the overwhelming suggestion is to increase RAM. Stupid question,
but can this best be purchased online through storage (?) vendors, or do I
need to find a store specializing in computer sales/repairs?

You can shop online memory vendors, many have online tools available to
help you identify the proper type of memory for your computer, here are
examples of vendors with such tools:


http://www.4allmemory.com/
http://www.upgradememory.com/
http://www.powerleap.com/

If you want to know how much RAM is installed in your computer you can
usually see that figure displayed when the computer does its POST when
it boots, or you can go in the BIOS and find the information.

The article referenced by John John appears to lean in the direction of
using a separate drive. Since my second drive (E was simply replaced with
my present, larger C: drive, does this make the E: drive a "slave," which
would argue for leaving the pagefile on the C: drive? (I do not use the E:
drive at all.)

Look in the Device Manager for your ATA/IDE controllers, you will see a
Primary and a Secondary controller, the drives will be in a Master/Slave
relationship if they are listed under the same controller. Or open the
computer case and look at the data cables going to the drive, if both
drives are on the same cable then they are in a Master/Slave relationship.

 

[John John (MVP)]

The controllers will both be under the same heading, you have to look to
see what is on the actual controllers, are the hard drives both shown to
be attached to the same controller?

John

 

[Gordon Biggar]

Thanks for the lead. "4all memory" even analyzes your computer for you;
what could be simpler?

Under Device Manager, both the Primary and Secondary IDE Channels are shown
under the heading IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, so it looks like I move the
pagefile back to the C drive!

Regardless, I am optimistic about the memory fix.

My thanks, once again.

Gordon Biggar

 

[Gordon Biggar]

This is almost as much fun as my Model "A" Ford restoration work - but, much
cleaner...

Both hard drives are attached to the same ribbon cable, which plugs into the
board at one location. Hence, my E drive must be considered a slave, so
it's back to the C drive we go with pagefile. N'est-ce pas?

Another dumb question: it appears that I have five (white) PCI(?) slots
(about 4 inches long), into three of which cards are plugged. There is a
shorter (1.5"), brown slot on the bottom (unused), and a longer (3.5"),
brown slot at the top. I am presuming that it is this upper slot into which
the memory (which I ordered today from 4all...) card will fit, although that
should be self-evident when I have the card in hand.

Again, my thanks!

Gordon Biggar

 

[John John (MVP)]

See Inline:

This is almost as much fun as my Model "A" Ford restoration work - but, much
cleaner...

Both hard drives are attached to the same ribbon cable, which plugs into the
board at one location. Hence, my E drive must be considered a slave, so
it's back to the C drive we go with pagefile. N'est-ce pas?

Yes, that confirms that your IDE drives are both plugged in to the same
controller so they are in a Master/Slave relationship. As I mentioned
earlier data can only flow to one drive at a time on the same controller
so there isn't all that much to gain from having the pagefile on the
second disk, if the operating system is busy reading or writing to the
system disk and if it must page to load large files or open a big
program then one disk will have to wait while the other does its things.
If the second drive were on the second IDE controller then the
operating system would be able to read and write to both drives at the
same time.

Another dumb question: it appears that I have five (white) PCI(?) slots
(about 4 inches long), into three of which cards are plugged. There is a
shorter (1.5"), brown slot on the bottom (unused), and a longer (3.5"),
brown slot at the top. I am presuming that it is this upper slot into which
the memory (which I ordered today from 4all...) card will fit, although that
should be self-evident when I have the card in hand.

The memory sticks only go in one way and they will only fit into memory
slots on the board, it is impossible to fit them in the wrong slots or
to fit them backwards. The memory slots are usually in banks of two,
most motherboards have four memory slots. Just don't force things when
you install them, and be careful about static electricity, unplug the
power cord before you start, then depress the power button to discharge
any residual power and touch the metal frame of the computer to
discharge any static electricity before you handle the RAM sticks.

Again, my thanks!

You're welcome, good luck with your project! Let us know if you notice
any improvement in performance after you install the new RAM.

John

 

[John John (MVP)]

You could put the second drive with the CD drive on the second
controller, pay attention to the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumper
settings on the drives. The 39/40 pins doesn't or shouldn't matter, for
quite a while now IDE devices have only 39 pins. For better performance
you should use 80 wire cables. One problem sometimes encountered is
that the cable might be too short to reach from the CD to the hard drive.

John

 

[Dave Patrick]

John, I thought this was usually a bad idea since the slower CD-Rom disk
reads would potentially hog the data highway.



--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[Gordon Biggar]

I like tearing things apart....I might even become dangerous....

It turns out that both hard drives are in fact plugged in to the Primary IDE
slot (using 40-pin connectors). The Secondary IDE slot is used by a CD
drive, and there is an unused 39-pin connector attached. Would it make
sense to attach the E drive to this pin instead (assuming that a 39-pin
connector will work on a hard drive), enabling me to utilize the E drive for
the pagefile?

I located the memory slots. I remember from a previous life plugging in
extra storage to one of these (on a Windows 95 machine, perhaps).

Will keep y'all posted on performance. Memory won't arrive for a week, says
4all.

Gordon

 

[John John (MVP)]

Apparently not any more, I had a discussion about this with Ron Martell
sometime ago and I recall him saying that this problem is not a concern
on todays computers. I can't find the discussion in question but I
found this where he gives the same information to another poster:

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...e3?lnk=st&q=cd-rom+ide+slave#cc4a52d9cd37b5e3

I can't be 100% sure on it, I took Ron's word on it and I've never
looked into it any further.

John

 

[John John (MVP)]

Update:

I sent an email to Seagate and asked them about this. They didn't
really say if it this still applies or not but they said that they don't
recommend IDE channel sharing for these different devices. They
recommend placing the hard disks on one controller and the ATAPI devices
on the other one. If the devices must share the same channel they
recommend placing the hard disk in the Master position.

I think that following your advice would be the prudent thing to do, or
to use a PCI controller card for the hard disks.

Regards;

John

 

[Dave Patrick]

Thanks for checking it out John.


--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect