Windows I accidentally ordered a second 512Mb stick while drunk

...And now I'm trying to justify it to myself.

The only thing I can think to do with 1Gb of memory is disable the Windows swap file.
Is this a good idea? Is £81.89+VAT too much to pay for the bragging rights of having no swap file?
Should I have my credit card taken off me immediately?

 

You can never have to much memory

 

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't windoze (any version) insist on using the pagefile regardless of the amount of actual RAM installed? Hence, getting rid of it would actually degrade performance.

 

yep...windoze 2k onwards is smart enough to figure out to take 1.5x ram amount on virtual ram space, whereas on win98 and that crap it needs to be set...no virtual ram and your pc will lag...

and if you dont want that extra stick of 512 give it to me

 

There is a registry hack to make XP (2K?) use up all physical memory before it moves onto virtual.

 

Idd in win98 you can disable it or set the max/min size quite easily, but isn't it ****ing STUPID if you start using virtual RAM when there's still a ****ing HUGE amount of 512mb left????? Come on people, I'm on a 1.9gb HD here and 160mb RAM with win98 and halflife on the lowest resolution possible, and still it requires 200mb free space for the swapfile!

Edit (Fly) : DO NOT circumvent the swear filter relix, you Have been warned about this once before.

 

not true....u get to a point where ur system actually slows down cause the cpu has to search though so much ram.....512 is the normal sweet spot for gaming *with xp atleast*.....afew people use 1gig for rendering and graphics......usualy only servers use +1gig....

 

nah, renderfarms use top whack (4GB).

 

i found that 512 is a very nice amount to have....and not too expensive...

 

i meant small home renders.....hell i dont even wanna thing about what pros use...make me feel inferior....

 

Update:

Well the second 512Mb stick is in and placebo effect or not but I can see a positive improvement in Windows' general performance. And I seem to have a 50-100 point bump in 3DMark2001SE as well, which is nice.

I haven't disabled the swapfile yet, I'm a bit nervous about that but I will try it soon.

Conclusion: XP eats memory.

 

Ummmm.... no. RAM doesn't work like that. As per the name it's randomly accessed rather than sequentially accessed, so adding more RAM doesn't mean that you have to search through more of it to find something. An OS (any OS- Win, linux, BeOS, OSX, etc) hands out chunks of RAM to a running process to use. A process views all of the chunks of RAM it owns as a single contiguous chunk, and keeps tabs on what variables are stored where in the chunk. When it requests the value of a variable the OS is passed the offset from the beginning of the process's contiguous chunk and from there the OS can work out exactly which memory address to ask the memory controller for in 2 or 3 operations. It doesn't have to do any additional 'searching'



kata

 

If you're not happy with your gig, feel free to give some to me.

 

send it back or sell a stick?

and Relix has been a naughty boy, tut tut.

.icecube

 

I'm very happy with my silly amount of RAM, thankyouverymuch.

Approx. 100 extra 3DMark points, and it now takes 15 minutes less to encode each episode of The West Wing to DivX (for my own personal use, I hasten to point out). Plus XP is that little bit nicer to use in general.

I recommend it

 

Good God. I wish I had the account to support a mistake like that. Sheesh. But then...the order would have just bounced - and hard .