Is it possible to take a portion of your hard drive and make it RAM, or does it have to be an actual Ram card?

Windows already does it. It is called Virtual Memory. You can manually set a max an min to optimize it and make it run better.

Control Panel / System Properties / Advanced / Performance Settings / Advanced / Change

Minimum should be 1.5x your RAM
and Maximum should be 3x your RAM

Preferably on a harddrive that does not house your OS. If you only have 1 harddrive don't worry about it.

So if you have 512MB
Min = 768MB
Max = 1536MB

yeah its called paging.

so if i have 2GB of RAM can i just disable this to utilize all my RAM instead of using HDD space??

You could but I don't see the benefit. You are going to use the 2GB of RAM regardless. XP can handle up to 4GB (I think only 3GB of physical). If, by the rare chance, that all 2GB fill up you are going to want the extra from the paging file.

not to sound like a newb but how would i see how much is being used?

Task Manager / Performance

This prog defrags the pagefile:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...PageDefrag.mspx

lol. whats all this mean?

Here's a nice freeware program I use to track my RAM usage and defrag it when necessary.
WinOverBoost. Very easy to configure and absolutely noob friendly.


TuneUp Utilities is also a very nice utility software package that includes RAM defrag, Registry Defrag, Registry cleaner, disk cleaner, etc. . . . But it's not free. Click here for more info/free trial

thanks. well i am running 12 programs right now. anti-virus, excel, word, nero, cyber-shot ultility, WMP, iTunes (playing), media center, task manager, IE, FireFox (multiple tabs), and AIM. and physical remains at 1,297,300K available at the lowest.

It means you didn't know you can press 'Alt - <Prt Scr>' to capture only the current window.

Alex, I never saw those Apps before, I will check them out.

ok lol. my bad. i will admit i didnt know that.

If you can spare $30, Tune Up Utilities is an absolutely great program.
I bought it after reading a review in PC magazine. I also like their embedded win Styler program.
With it, I can change the default startup image as well as use custom icons.

Of course, I use the 1-click maintenance feature almost daily.
Screenshots of the 1-click maintenance I just performed:

well all i want to know is can i turn off paging and just use my RAM. i dont really want HDD space to be used for this.

PC's are pre-configured to use Virtual RAM to make things go smoother and run more efficiently.
Of course, you can turn off the Paging files and force your PC to run strictly through your RAM.

Doing this may cause some instabilitiy issues and everytime I've done this, it affects my shutdown capabilities (PC never shuts down when I tell it to).

If you have more than 1 gig of RAM, go ahead and turn off VRAM if you'd like. If you don't like the results, simply turn it back on. If you're running a 5400RPM hdd, you're better off turning off your VRAM anyway.

Hmm..

So let's see..I have 2gb of RAM..and like 1.4tb of HDD space..

..so I can have like 2.5gb of Virtual memory or like..6gb of virtual memory!?!? jesus christ O_o

wow... this grew fast.

Where can I tell how many RPM's my HDD is?

i indeed have a 5400RPM hdd. its in a laptop.

HOW DID YOU FIND THAT OUT?????

Depends on your OS.What HDD do you have?

I don't know... lol

i found my PC on the toshiba website and it told me.

Start / Run / compmgmt.msc / Disc Management / Disc 0 / <right click> properties

It says the manufacturer is (Standard Disc Drives) and the model or w/e is WDC WD1600BB-22RDA0

Quick search of 'WD1600BB' on google gives us this:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.as...amp;language=en


So yours is 7200rpm

I have Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

Max 4Gb of memory physical + virtual

so i have turned off paging about 2 hours ago and no problems whatsoever. and it seems like it sped up a little. thanks for the suggestions.

CJ, don't take a guess. Benchmark both and see which is better.
http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/

So since my hdd is 7200 RPM I was wondering: I only have 512MB of RAM, and want to upgrade to vista, but the aero minumum is 1GB, so could I upgrade and raise my Virtual Memory and use that instead of buying more RAM?

no

^ so how much combined ram is vista suppose to support.

BTW - I haven't seen a reason to upgrade yet.

I had no idea so I did some searching.

I think this is how it goes:
32bit (all versions) - 4GB
64bit (home basic) - 8GB
64bit (home premium) - 16GB
64bit (all else) - 128GB

I haven't seen a good reason to upgrade Win98 yet. I would have said Win95 but I like USB
But, like every other sap out there, I upgraded before and I will do it again.
Although, I think I will stick with XP until I get a 64bit CPU and a DirectX 10 video card.

Don't get too excited about the paging file.. It's not unlimited memory, it's a fallback incase you run out of real RAM.

Most RAM today runs at about 3GB per second (double that in some cases), and the paging file (your hard drive) runs typically 40MB per second (double with raid). MAJOR difference.

Does Virtual memory have to be a HD? I just checked virtual memory and it listed all the drives on my computer. If I put an sd card or flash drive into drive J or something, could I use that as virtual memory?

ok so i have disabled paging and havent had a problem. i have read that after you disable it the pagefile.sys is still on the HDD. how would i go about deleting this to regain this space?

bump