Benefits of 8GB over 4GB

you require pagefile for doing memory dumps and considering the lot of you on here have unstable machines that bsod a lot :) your gonna need that page file unless you turn off the memory dumps.

also some old apps refuse to start up (an old version of sage did this to me) if there is no pagefile. can be sorted by setting a pagefile size of 16mb even.

also someone mentioned that its best to leave the pagefile set to system managed. thats just plain daft and stupid. i recently built a machine with 16gb ram in it and the pagefile that system used was over 16gb big.
considering that system had a 74gb raptor in it as the sole hard disk, 16gb chunk is a huge waste on a raptor. i manually set it to 1gb pagefile and left it at that. could have set to even smaller size but not fussed since 16gb+ is taking the wee.

yellowbeard said that windows pages its drivers etc to pagefile regardless of ram amount, thats correct but i believe the registry command DisablePagingExecutive set to 1 will prevent windows from doing that and keep all stuff in ram.

if your sure you dont have apps that require specific use of a page file then you can just turn it off or either stick the pagefile on a different drive or just stick it to the minimum allowed size of 16mb and your system will be fine depending on the apps you use.

at worst you open up a file in photoshop or something that exceeds your physical ram amount and you get out of memory error. in which case start looking for 32gig ram setup.
hahahaha
 
it has been discussed to the death on here before, the end result is always the same, windows knows best

Perhaps this is the case, but I am not convinced yet. Windows without a page file doesn't appear to crash for me. If I find a program that insists on a pagefile existing, I'll put a small one in a ramdisk.
This is with windows XP, 2gb of ram. Roughly 10 gb of hard drive space available to it.

The motivation behind not using swap is that I'm on a 30gb ssd. There is a lot of literature online saying using this as swap is a bad call in terms of drive lifespan, but more importantly the drive is small and I'd rather use the 2gb elsewhere. Since the machine is effectively triplebooting, there is not space to squander on virtual memory.
 
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Perhaps this is the case, but I am not convinced yet. Windows without a page file doesn't appear to crash for me. If I find a program that insists on a pagefile existing, I'll put a small one in a ramdisk.
This is with windows XP, 2gb of ram. Roughly 10 gb of hard drive space available to it.

The motivation behind not using swap is that I'm on a 30gb ssd. There is a lot of literature online saying using this as swap is a bad call in terms of drive lifespan, but more importantly the drive is small and I'd rather use the 2gb elsewhere. Since the machine is effectively triplebooting, there is not space to squander on virtual memory.

if it works for you then thats great.
also by the way can you check your c: drive for a pagefile.sys file? you got to reveal hidden system / protected os files view to see it. let me know if it still exists and how big it is.
 
I got 8gig ages ago. One of the sticks died so I run 6gb now, theres not much difference in performance with or without page file off. They were cheap so I got it.
Theres no reason not to have 8gig if you can get it cheap but no reason to need it either.
 
yellowbeard said that windows pages its drivers etc to pagefile regardless of ram amount, thats correct but i believe the registry command DisablePagingExecutive set to 1 will prevent windows from doing that and keep all stuff in ram.

I install Citrix for a living and this is one of our server build tweaks.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757875.aspx

We also set the paging file min and max values to the same e.g. System RAM + 1MB to allow a full memory dump if required.

WhiteKnight
 
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Just jumping in..........

Ive currently got 4GB of Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz .

Im using Photoshop CS4 on a 32bit Vista. Quad core 3.0Ghz CPU and 3TB HD's

Would having 8Gb make any difference as 32bit does see it?
When I 1st had it Vista only recognised 3.??? anyway til an update.

Wonder if W7 will be better?

I get through 4Gb easily with Photoshop, Bridge and a few RAW files running
 
The most RAM that XP can address is 3.25GB, you're not doing anything wrong - that's just how it is.
If you want more RAM you'll need to move to a 64bit OS, then you can have up to 127GB, theoretically :)
 
if it works for you then thats great.
also by the way can you check your c: drive for a pagefile.sys file? you got to reveal hidden system / protected os files view to see it. let me know if it still exists and how big it is.

Sure. I'm capable of finding such a file, and it isn't there. If however I set the paging file to 2gb and reboot, one appears appropriately. I then set it back to zero and reboot and it's gone. So zero bytes.

I like the analogy with a car crash. If anyone here knows a way to put the pagefile onto a networked drive, then I'd love to hear it, and will go back to giving XP however much virtual memory it like. It still can't have any of my ssd though :)

edit: Well, it turns out I didn't need to put it on a network drive. Virtualbox made life simple once again. Credit to the guys in my other thread for getting me to the answer, but I am now running XP with a 4gb swap file on a separate drive. Consider me convinced :)

Thank you
 
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Think you can actually get a little closer to 4GB if you use "PAE" support in XP

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx

it's still limited to 2gb per app though.


this thread is annoying me now

read these.

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/04/13/memory-management-dude-where-s-my-ram.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/04/13/memory-management-dude-where-s-my-ram.aspx

if you want to argue with Russionovich, feel free :p

bottom line is 32bit os = 3.5gb limit, 2gb per app

PAE causes huge instability when you have soundcard drivers and video card drivers -unless they're WHQL'd for server, which will have support for PAE.

It doesn't make sense for driver writers to factor in PAE support, when they can just make a 64bit driver as PAE is essentially pointless now with 64bit on the rise


guys, can we have this http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=129999 as a sticky.
 
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Is there away to utilise pae in 64 bit windows ? Might be handy if it works to claw back memory in vista and win7 cant address for whatever reason. XP64 is fine with 4gb, but vista/win7 wont have it on my A8R-MVP board. Only shows 2818mb (same as 32bit).

Not a big issue, but would like to see it all working ;)
 
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The Hardware Remaping option is enabled. This allows bios to show 4096mb available and XP64 task manager then shows all 4gb available. An OS issue in vista/win7 wont allow more 2818 and have to enable max memory option in msconfig/advanced for it to not bsod.(wont let my type more then 2818 in the max mem box either) Does say 4gb in system though (2.75 available) on system info screen.

Bios is latest 0605 Beta (19/12/08)
 
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