Some questions for PC experts

[Larry_OHF]

* 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?

[WillowIX]

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.

[Paladin2000]

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.

[Larry_OHF]

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.

[/)eathKiller]

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.

[Vaskez]

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.

[andrewas]

Originally posted by Vaskez: 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.

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 ]

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by andrewas: quote: Originally posted by Vaskez: 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.

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.
[/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.

[Gammit]

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.

[Larry_OHF]

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?