Virtual Memory Settings

[Sarrkazztic]

I have a friend that I am trying to help with his computer..I built it for him. It is a 650 mhz athlon slot A Pvk7 via kx133 motherboard 384 mb pc 133 sdram 30 gig hard drive dvd-drive and cd burner Running WinME. He does video editing so he pushes it pretty hard. My question is this he wants me to tweak the virtual memory settings. He read somewhere that if you do not let windows manage the virtual memory and change it to use double the amount of physical memory that should be sufficient. That would make a 768 meg swap file. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of tweak..Any NOTICEABLE performance gains? Any suggestions?

[McStagger]

The 2.5 X the amount of RAM tweak is a little outdated. With 384MB of RAM you will notice only marginal increases in performance. The tweak works exceptionally well on older machines, but with the amount of RAM your friend has, it wouldn't help a lot.

There was a thread posted here a week or two ago that described a good solution ( I don't remember the author or the title). It involved using a particular piece of software ( i don't remember the title, maybe someone will come along who does), using it to mesure how much VM your PC uses at max, set that as your minimum amount and let windows set your max.

Sorry again about the blanks in this post.



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If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried

[rednek tek]

It's probably not worth the bother with modern gargantuan hard drives and low latency RAM to manually set the swap file--the system automatically deletes the swap file during shutdown anyway. I have tried it both ways and it doesn't seem to make a difference.



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Ain't found a way to kill me yet...yeah they come to stop the rooster..ya know he ain't gonna die....

[miroslav]

Originally posted by sarrkazztic:
I have a friend that I am trying to help with his computer..I built it for him. It is a 650 mhz athlon slot A Pvk7 via kx133 motherboard 384 mb pc 133 sdram 30 gig hard drive dvd-drive and cd burner Running WinME. He does video editing so he pushes it pretty hard. My question is this he wants me to tweak the virtual memory settings. He read somewhere that if you do not let windows manage the virtual memory and change it to use double the amount of physical memory that should be sufficient. That would make a 768 meg swap file. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of tweak..Any NOTICEABLE performance gains? Any suggestions?

probably 200 meg ram swap file will be plenty for him.. the important thing and probably the only advantage to set the min and the max size to the sam number is drastic reduction of HD fragmentation... if you have norton utilities you can move your fixed swap file to the begin of the master HD or at the bigin of the primary partition...
without norton utilities (i am not going to infest my computer with things like that) it might be better to put the swap file in the other partition that way the fragmentation will be minimum ( i have my swapfile in D togheter with the windowsME cabfiles, there is about 800 meg unused space... my swapfile is min=max=200meg) ... for the complete explanation you can visit this site www.rojakpot.com and look in the "Speed Demonz' Area."
Regards Miro

[teachscuba]

sarrkazztic,

Let me throw my 2-cents in here. 1,000 GHZ, eMonster, 256Ram, 20 gig HD...

I've had good luck in all the Win9x programs by adding the following to the system.ini under the 386Enh section.

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

This forces Windows to use all of the possible RAM before going to the swap file which allegedly speeds up your machine due to faster RAM as opposed to Virtual Memory on the HD.

Agree w/ Miroslav about setting a "fixed" Virtual Memory size and placing it either on another HD or another partition other than the C: drive.

As he stated, a FIXED Virtual Mem size will prevent file fragmentation.

I personally use Norton System Works 2001; there is a section that will "Optimize" your Swap File and place it contiguiously at the beginning sectors of the HD--which I like.

McStagger is correct in that there is a "program" to check Swap File (Virtual Memory) usage on that machine. It's a standard Windows program..... "System Monitor" which should be installed on the computer already during setup. If not, use the CD and install System Monitor.

Once installed, just power it up and set it to watch the "Virtual Memory" (or Swap File) and record a log as to the size of the file. After a day or two, view the log file to see the MAX amount of VM the computer's used and then set the VM size (Max & Min the same) in Control Panel, System, Performance tab.

Trust I've not been too obtuse/technical... if so, email and I'll get back w/ you.

Best,

t


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Tony Fertitta
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