Optimising RAM

leche solara

I recently acquired and installed additional RAM bringing my machine to 1.5GB of ram. I can see in system in control panel that I have 1.5gb ram, but is there any way of optimising it. Is some of it going to waste or being unused or can I share/partition some of it for other applications graphics etc.

jessy

not exactly sure what your trying to do here, are you worried that you dont have enough ram. what application do you run? Advice would be not to try and fill your ram. if you have a lot of free ram then you probably have to much for what you use you computer for. why did you add more ram?

leche solara

I increased RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB as I use a lot of applications simultaneously including memory intensive apps such as photo and video editing. I found that some apps were crawling and the extra RAM has made a big improvement. My question was whether I now have too much RAM and if surplus RAM could be assigned to something else (I'm not sure what else! cache, video ??)

Mercury_Tilt

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leche solara

The RAM I added is 2 good quality 512 DDR 400 modules. I dont even know what that means. When you say I should make use of the DDR what does that involve?

NotMe

You could create a RAM drive if you have a lot of free RAM. It's a virtual drive in RAM that you can use for holding temporary files and access to a RAM drive will be a thousand times faster than access to the harddrive. You say to do a lot of photo and video editing so you could set up your apps to use the ram drive for temporary files and it would really speed them up.

Mercury_Tilt

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leche solara

Thanks all for replies

You could create a RAM drive if you have a lot of free RAM.

How do I go about doing this and how much RAM should I assign to it. Will doing this effect performance of other applications. How do I set up my apps to use RAM drive to benefit from additional speed.

I believe I have the RAM sticks in the right place (according to instruction manual)

padraigf

You shouldn't really do anything at all to optimise it. Windows will share it out between all your applications just fine. A ram drive wont increase performance at all. It's just a virtual hard drive where files are saved on your RAM. It gets wiped every time the PC is shut down. Only really useful if u want your games to be able to start up insanely fast

NotMe

leche solara wrote:

How do I go about doing this and how much RAM should I assign to it. Will doing this effect performance of other applications.

I don't know of any freeware programs that do this. I have been looking. TweakXP lets you create a RAM disk. The trial version of TweakXP lets you run it 30 times so you could try it out. How much RAM you assign for it is up to you really. How much free RAM do you have? When you're running a memory intensive program, look at task manager and check how much free RAM you have. You can always make the RAM drive smaller if you find yourself running out of RAM.

How do I set up my apps to use RAM drive to benefit from additional speed.

Depends on the app. I have Corel PhotoPaint and in the options it lets you choose a disk to use as a swap disk. Most video editors let you choose where you want to store temporary files.

po0k

What motherboard model do you have?
You may be better off ditching the "odd" stick of 512 and putting the other two (I'm assuming matching) pair in Dual Channel mode. This totally depends on your motherboard.

As for optimising the usage of your ram, there isn't much point really, maybe increase buffer sizes or the amount of ram that programs can use as cache.

If you multi-task alot a SMP or DP/HT based system might be better (ie multiple physical CPUs, cores or "thread handling").