<font color=skyblue>
* I was told it would be good to recount my virtue memory to double my acutal memory. I have 512MB of SDRAM. I have been told to up that to 1,024MB. Is there any long or short-term effects to this that are negative?

* I was thinking of adding a slave drive(HD). I can see the benefit of mirroring my current drive, as a backup unit...but I am told there are more reasons to have a second HD. Something about one holding applications and another holding something else. Who uses two drives, and why?

</font>

Well I use two HDD but three logical drives. I then have c:, d; and e:. C and D are on my master. C hosts all applications and D all my games. E (which is the slave) is simply for storage, all my LPs and a bunch of photos and movies of the family.

I don´t see any adverse effects of putting your virtual memory to 1Gb if you´ve got the space for it. That´s what I´m using and I haven´t had any problems with my virtual memory.

If you are running Windows 95/98, you will need maximum of 700 MB of Virtual memory. More than that would be a waste of space. It is recommend to put the virtual memory in a less frequently used partition drive. For example, all my programs are kept in Drive C, where as all my games are in Drive D. My Drive E are for downloaded programs and Virtual memory.

<font color=skyblue>So, you are saying that I can designate which partition of my drive to take virtual memory space? And the limit is 700MB? Okay, great! Thanks! I will try that when I get home.

By the way...do you know that limit of RAM that WinXP takes? I hope to get it, when it becomes more stable and secure. I hear that they will be releasing a WinXPSE soon. </font>

heh... Virtue memory.. that's a good one... oh you're seriouse...
err I think you mean Virtual memory, and yes its in your options memory, the only disadvantas of running more apps than your computer really wants and using up hard disk space temporarily to do it is... well... SLOW DOWN and lots of it. It eventually might take 20 minutes to start up your computer if you open like 5 windows every time your comp starts up. Its a gradual change so you wont notice it, and if you want to go back you just turn your virtual memory off, also, some old applications can't runw with V-memory going or encouter errors, like My motion capture software.

1)Actually, if you have loads of RAM like you do with 512MB, it's better to turn virtual memory off altogether. Why? Because if it's on, Windows will use it and you don't want that because your real memory is much faster than continually swapping in pages of memory from your hard disk. You only need virtual memory if you don't have enough actual RAM ie. real memory.

2) Yep, adding a 2nd hard disk is a good idea. The point is not only organisational though. You should partition your drives anyway. Put the operating system on its own partition which is as small as possible. This way you can defragment only that drive often as that will experience the most changes and this will speed up your OS loads. Put all your applications on another partition. This partition shouldn't change much so you won't need to defrag it so often and good job too as it will be much bigger.
Personally, I have 2 HDs as well. On the first one I have drives C: and D: C: is Windows 2000, D: is applications.
On the 2nn disk I have drives H: for work and personal files, G: for games and I: for large files like graphics and videos and music.
Of course it;s good to keep a copy of important data on both drives but I wouldn't bother mirroring - this takes up loads of space - unless you really can't afford the time to reinstall things if your whole HD crashes.

Just use the windows backup program to back everything up onto your second drive.

True point, but I dont know any reliable method of determining if you have enough real memory. Without any virtual at all your system will die a death if you exceed capacity, whereas if you have virtual memory the system gets slower as you use more of it, so you have some idea of when your running out.

Besides, XP is quite efficient at handling memory for a large single process application - like most games. A power user with loads of applications open would benefit more from turning off virtual memory, and be more vulnerable to system crashes caused by it.

[/qb][/quote]

2) Yep, adding a 2nd hard disk is a good idea. The point is not only organisational though. You should partition your drives anyway. Put the operating system on its own partition which is as small as possible. This way you can defragment only that drive often as that will experience the most changes and this will speed up your OS loads. Put all your applications on another partition. This partition shouldn't change much so you won't need to defrag it so often and good job too as it will be much bigger.
Personally, I have 2 HDs as well. On the first one I have drives C: and D: C: is Windows 2000, D: is applications.
On the 2nn disk I have drives H: for work and personal files, G: for games and I: for large files like graphics and videos and music.
Of course it;s good to keep a copy of important data on both drives but I wouldn't bother mirroring - this takes up loads of space - unless you really can't afford the time to reinstall things if your whole HD crashes.

Just use the windows backup program to back everything up onto your second drive.[/QB][/QUOTE]

No arguments with this though. If you have loads of money mirror RAID is the way to go for reliability, but for a home user its overkill at best. For myself I just copy important saves to floppy, and usualy I dont bother with even that.

[ 01-20-2003, 03:35 PM: Message edited by: andrewas ]

True point, but I dont know any reliable method of determining if you have enough real memory. Without any virtual at all your system will die a death if you exceed capacity, whereas if you have virtual memory the system gets slower as you use more of it, so you have some idea of when your running out.

Besides, XP is quite efficient at handling memory for a large single process application - like most games. A power user with loads of applications open would benefit more from turning off virtual memory, and be more vulnerable to system crashes caused by it.
</font>[/QUOTE]This is not entirely true in my experience. If you run out of virtual memory, windows automatically increases the page file size. Also, you can tell how much memory is being used my looking at the task manager in XP or 2000. I can have aroun 10 applications open and only around a 3rd of my 640MB RAM is in use. This gives you a good idea if not entirely accurate. And yeah, I was basing my suggestion on my usage which is for example having a graphical editor open with a game windowed in the background plus my email program and music player and loads of web windows open.

WinXP can take 2GB of RAM, I think. I have 1GB, and it's cruising pretty nicely. I personally use a second hard drive as a back-up. I keep a copy of all of my patches, saved games, updates, my music, etc on my second (smaller) hard drive, and use my main drive for everything else.

<font color=skyblue>Okay, I set myself up, giving the partion E drive my virtual memory, set at 700, since I have Win98. So, what can I do to test my new power? Do you agree that setting it to the E drive (the quietest of the three partitions) was the right place to send it?

</font>

So you have 3 partitions? One for OS, one for applications and one for virtual memory? Sounds pretty good, but read my post above - you might want to consider not using virtual memory at all.

<font color=skyblue>The hardest thing I do on my PC is run Neverwinter Nights...and I like to push the engine to it's limit when I am working in the Toolset. Other items are picture scanning, or music-playing...nothing so big.

So...you are saying that if I turn off the Virtual memory all together...there would be no chance for me crashing? I am worried, but maybe I will give it a try right now. Wht's the worst that can happen, right?

Er...while I have your attention...about NWN...why do I get a Windows error in the toolset? I frequently get a Win32 API function failure. What can I do about that???</font>

Well in my experience, if you have over 512MB RAM, it never even comes close to being fully used. Therefore in theory there is no need for virtual memory. While you are experimenting you can keep tabs on memory usage by presing control+alt+delete and checking the task manager for current memory usage.
BTW I'm just wondering if you actually know how to turn virtual memory off because you say you are not a computer expert. Simply setting VM to 0 will not turn it off, windows will probably try to resize it automatically. You have to go into the registry and set the VMdisabled key to true. I can't remember where this is right now, but a search for turning off virtual memory on windows XP on google shoould find it.

Hehe and you're right, the worst that can happen is that your computer crashes and you lose any unsaved data and you have to reboot. It's not a big deal as long as you save stuff regularly, but the performance increase while multi-tasking should be worth it.

Hmm I haven't got NWN. Dunno about that toolset error. Sounds like windows doesn't like one of the commands it is trying to execute. See if you can isolate the problem and then you can find out if this is a known bug or what.

[ 01-20-2003, 08:41 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

<font color=skyblue>I have given you the wrong impression..I do NOT have WinXP...I have Win98. When I CTRL+ALT+DEL, there is no task manager, like on 2000. I know, because I have seen it on my work PC.

On system/performance/Virtual Memory...there is a box that can be checked or unchecked to turn off VM.

I want to believe you, that you are right...but why does nobody else that I know do it, yet work on PCs all day? I have heard (besides on this thread), alot of different opinions on it. Just like me, people want to believe your approach...but none have experience with it, and one guy said he would be afraid to try.

What can prove to me that it is safe for my applications?
Again...I want you to be right...I am not trying to say you are wrong...I just need more reference....I hope you understand.</font>

On the safe side, better keep the virtual memory. I don't know how much RAM is exactly "enough" and I don't think M$ would be able to answer that either but I am not going to crash my game when Win98 runs out of "real" memory. IMO of course.

Come to think of it, you might want to leave some extra space in the last drive in case if you need to increase the virtual memory but from what I have read (from some tech site), 700MB should be sufficient.

Dont have 512Mb RAM in a win98 machine anyway. The memory handler dosent know how to handle it efficiently.

Im still against turning off virtual memory in win98 at least. XP was heavily reworked (well, most of the imnprovements come from the win2K line) to be more stable than NT and 9x, so it should recover nicely from a crash like that.

Win98 dosent even have a bounds check on the memory handles - it will actualy assign memory that it has no way to keep track of. It was *designed* to crash when loaded beyond a certain point. And I woudnt trust it without virtual memory.

I would advise, don't set too much virtual memory, as Vaskez said, it's part of your hard drive used as memory, thus much slower to access.

BUT don't turn it off altogether with Win98 - I tried once and was rewarded with many crashes. Win98 doesn't like not having virtual memory at all.

I would say that 2/3 real memory, 1/3 virtual memory would be a good set.

EDIT : If you can spare the space, set the virtual memory to your HD with the quickest access rate.

[ 01-21-2003, 06:14 AM: Message edited by: Moiraine ]

Sorry I assumed that you had XP. Didn't read all your earlier posts properly and just saw that you mentioned XP in one of them and then remembered wrongly that you had XP. Anyway, I agree with what the others have said - don't turn VM off in windows 98 as it is not clever enough to deal with crashes like 2000 or XP.
However, you might wanna try what Moraine said - anything to make it use more real memory than VM because the more you give it, the more it will use.
Anyway, here is a good guide, scroll down to number 4, although this is for windows ME, ME is the same basic architecture as 98.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinME/supertweaks.htm

It tells you that some software always requires virtual memory (i.e. a swap file)
no matter how much RAM you have so if you are running s/w like that you can't get away with no VM. Anyway, check out the link and make your own decision from the choices listed. Hope I have helped you somewhat....

<font color=skyblue>Okay, by reading all this, and crashing my PC twice when I turned off VM...I finally decided to go with what one of you guys sent me as advice from a news article that dealt with VM. IN it, the man suggests that you set the Minimum VM to what you actualy have...(512MB), and set the Maximum to the max that the OS can handle, as long as it is not more than double the actual. So, I set the max to 700MB. Everything seems stable so far...but not noticing much difference yet.

I have another question. I upgraded my NVidia Drivers last week, because there were new drivers available from Dec, 2002. Now, when I log into Win98...The screen resolution for the Windows Passord prompt is set at 600x800, though my desktop remains as I want it at 1024x768.

I cannot figure out how to change the resolution of the start-up, before my password if accepted. I probably have to overlook my username settings, and find where the main resolution is logged, and change it there. Any idea?</font>

Larry, if your resolution is OK for your desktop, why bother about the login screen resolution ?

Yeah as explained above I advised you to turn VM off cos I thought you had XP. Anyway, turning it off is the fastest but as the article I linked above explains, it is only good in limited situation, sorry if I misled you. Anyway, up till now I did have a page file as I don't know how to turn VM off in win 2K (but I do in other windows versions, bah! :D ). I did as the article I linked advised and put the page file on my 2nd hard disk in its own partition and have noticed some speed up. Especially my shutdown is much quicker. [img]smile.gif[/img] I haven't yet tested it under heavy conditions i.e. with loads of apps running.
That is the next fastest solution after not using VM at all. The solution you are using was probably advised as it is the most STABLE solution, making sure you never run out of VM. If you are looking for speed up that is not a good solution. I have 640MB RAM and 256MB page file on its own partition on a seperate HD to the operating system. This seems to be the best solution and I have noticed speed up but this is with windows 2000.

You also said that you were thinking of getting windows XP. If I were you I'd get 2000 instead. It is just as stable and just as good at resource management. However it has been around for longer and so has better driver support and application support. Basically it has all the significant advantages of XP but not its annoying features, eg. built in MSN and "helpful" layers of menus which just slow experienced users down. 2000 also takes up less HD space.
Either that or do what I'm in the process of doing: get to know Linux and compeltely switch over to that. You can get it free, and choose from over 1000 distributions. All important software is free and you can get Wine which allows you to run windows software on it. I haven't tried it but I know someone who has it on Linux and plays Planescape Torment with it. Heh, sorry about the essay :D

About your other question: there is no "main" resolution setting. Each application sets its own display resolution or uses the desktop one. Before the drivers kick in when windows starts up, I guess the default resolution sets in which is 640x480, or you sure it's 800x600? I guess the new drivers must set the desktop resolution after you've logged in.

Some more arcane performance tips for multi-drive systems.

On your motherboard you have 2 IDE buses (the slots you can plug your drive cables into). You can gain some addtional performance by arranging your drives to maximize use of these buses. An IDE bus can support 2 devices, but it can only work one of these devices at a time, ie it sends a request to the drive to get a file and it stops and waits for the file. So... if you have two drives and most of your most performance demanding apps do not require access to your CDROM then you should place the drivess on seperate buses. Be aware that having partitions on the drive does not necessarily increase performance since you can only access one of these partitions at a time. They can be helpful for organizing data and defraging as already mentioned. Also smaller partions have smaller data block sizes, which means the drive space is used more efficiently.
Your swapfile by default is located on your system partition (almost always your C drive). It can be moved to any partition you like though.

One last thing that many folks do not know. Under Win 2k and XP you can mount a new parition to a folder on an existing harddrive, giving you an easy way to increase the size of an existing partition without have to move files around.

Now, if you are using SCSI drives ignore most of the above. As the computer can work with all the devices on the SCSI bus at the same time. Lets say you have three hard drives and CDROM on the same SCSI bus. The computer can request files from all four devices and the pick them up as each devices finds the requested files. While on an IDE bus it would make one request and wait for the results, then make the next request.

<font color=skyblue>Because after I give it the log-in password...the monitor blacks out and has to adjust to the desktop resolution, and there's that "pop" that you get when you are changing resolutions on your monitor, and it takes about 5 seconds longer than it used to for boot-up. It's just annoying, and I don't like that "pop" that comes from resolution fixes...</font>

[ 01-22-2003, 12:43 AM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]