3.5GB memory, Disabling Virtual Memory Paging

[cottonvibes]

so you guys think its a good or bad idea to disable Memory Paging using Windows XP?

i want my new RAM that i just baught to be put into good use, so i disabled Virtual Memory Paging, and edited my registry to disable paging as it says in this link.
Win XP Increasing System Performance by disable paging - Techie Corner


i was noticing b4 that windows still Cached about 1GB of stuff, when i had 3GB free memory.
this made me mad, so i read up on disabling the virtual memory.

so far its a bit faster and no problems.

but i still see in my task bar that windows is still paging and cacheing some stuff. even though i disabled it...

[PCXL-Fan]

are there any successful hacks to actually getting Physical Address Extension 32/64GB limit to work properly on XP like it did on past versions of 32bit Windows Server Edition?

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by PCXL-Fan

are there any successful hacks to actually getting Physical Address Extension 32/64GB limit to work properly on XP like it did on past versions of 32bit Windows Server Edition?

that would be cool.
but i havn't found anything that does that.

even if there were hacks to do that, i would doubt their stability.
and they could in theory make your computer slower for continuous error checking and such...

[PCXL-Fan]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

that would be cool.
but i havn't found anything that does that.

even if there were hacks to do that, i would doubt their stability.
and they could in theory make your computer slower for continuous error checking and such...

I believe you need ECC Memory with the additional parity bit to have error checking.

PAE doesn't have to be error checked.

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by PCXL-Fan

I believe you need ECC Memory with the additional parity bit to have error checking.

PAE doesn't have to be error checked.

nah... i ment software error checking from the hack (if there was one)

meaning that any hack that enables more than 3.5GB in windows XP, would have to check if memory is being written/read from the correct address for every read/write.
and that would probably slow things down alot.

but i'm not an expert on the subject, i'm just theorizing here

[Phil]

well your better off then me. vista uses 20 gb...talk about bloat

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by Phil

well your better off then me. vista uses 20 gb...talk about bloat

lol,

and the only way to make vista not use so much memory is to adjust its appearance to make it look like windows 95.

[Phil]

thats what im doing

[Thanakil]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

lol,

and the only way to make vista not use so much memory is to adjust its appearance to make it look like windows 95.

I always make my OS look like that anyway, personally. I don't see the point in fancy UI. And the memory it used wasn't that bad, it probably was using more memory than it seems at first glance, but in the taskmanager I only saw my memory usage increases by 50mb between old win95 look and Vista look.
(it certainly uses more power too, but since you talked only of memory, I'm just mentioning mem)

There is a lot of bloat tho (outside of Aero), my memory usage after a clean install with vista is twice what XP was. Something like 600-700mb used instead of 300-350 in XP.
(I'm trying to find a good guide of what I could disable in Vista that I don't need, but searching for stuff like that in google gives me results on how to disable UAC-only 99% of the time. I'll just keep on looking I guess.)

If you wanna talk about ridiculous tho : Move a window around the screen really fast (like in circle) or even just move the mouse ALONE.
Then look how much CPU power that uses... Horrific.
(this goes for the old win95 look too, it uses way too much cpu power)

But I'm just wondering, what are you talking about when you say 20gb Phil? =/ You mean the space Vista takes on your PC? (Mine doesn't even weight 10gb)

(Even tho Aero looks kinda nice and I didn't feel any real slowdown between XP and Vista when dual-booting, I still prefer using old UI just to be safe.)

[Dark Mits]

The only problem when disabling VM is with memory leaks. You may suddenly end up with 0 free space and only take notice because Windows stops responding. With VM enabled you notice it earlier because of the constant hard drive sounds and if you're lucky enough you'll get a Windows notification informing you that the page file is getting larger.

Another problem is that some games require VM to be enabled (one game required me to have 1GB before it would launch!!!) even if you have 10 times the max amount of memory the game will ever need.

[DB7]

Originally Posted by Thanakil

I always make my OS look like that anyway, personally. I don't see the point in fancy UI. And the memory it used wasn't that bad, it probably was using more memory than it seems at first glance, but in the taskmanager I only saw my memory usage increases by 50mb between old win95 look and Vista look.
(it certainly uses more power too, but since you talked only of memory, I'm just mentioning mem)

There is a lot of bloat tho (outside of Aero), my memory usage after a clean install with vista is twice what XP was. Something like 600-700mb used instead of 300-350 in XP.
(I'm trying to find a good guide of what I could disable in Vista that I don't need, but searching for stuff like that in google gives me results on how to disable UAC-only 99% of the time. I'll just keep on looking I guess.)

If you wanna talk about ridiculous tho : Move a window around the screen really fast (like in circle) or even just move the mouse ALONE.
Then look how much CPU power that uses... Horrific.
(this goes for the old win95 look too, it uses way too much cpu power)

But I'm just wondering, what are you talking about when you say 20gb Phil? =/ You mean the space Vista takes on your PC? (Mine doesn't even weight 10gb)

(Even tho Aero looks kinda nice and I didn't feel any real slowdown between XP and Vista when dual-booting, I still prefer using old UI just to be safe.)

If you want Vista to stop using so much memory, the service you need to disable/turn off is Superfetch, as this is the process that loads commonly used programs into the system memory so that they will load more quickly.

[Clements]

Don't disable the pagefile. If you have 2GB RAM or more, just set it to 200MB as a maximum size. That way you won't break certain applications that require a pagefile to run.

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by Thanakil

If you wanna talk about ridiculous tho : Move a window around the screen really fast (like in circle) or even just move the mouse ALONE.
Then look how much CPU power that uses... Horrific.
(this goes for the old win95 look too, it uses way too much cpu power)

yeah, when i had vista, everytime i monitored the CPU usage, it was always at 3~6%.
even when i had no programs running.
i was so pissed that i'm wasting that CPU performance on nothing.

Originally Posted by Dark Mits

The only problem when disabling VM is with memory leaks. You may suddenly end up with 0 free space and only take notice because Windows stops responding. With VM enabled you notice it earlier because of the constant hard drive sounds and if you're lucky enough you'll get a Windows notification informing you that the page file is getting larger.

Another problem is that some games require VM to be enabled (one game required me to have 1GB before it would launch!!!) even if you have 10 times the max amount of memory the game will ever need.

interesting,
i think i'm going to keep my pagefile disabled until i get any errors like that. then i'll re-enable it.

Originally Posted by Clements

Don't disable the pagefile. If you have 2GB RAM or more, just set it to 200MB as a maximum size. That way you won't break certain applications that require a pagefile to run.

but i'm pretty sure windows still uses paging regardless.
as i disabled it, and i still get alot of paged memory and commit charge in my task manager.
like i said above, i'm going to keep my paging disabled until i get a problem.

so far i've ran a few games, IE7, photoshop, and other programs, and i havn't had any problems.

and things are faster, since whenever i click on an old program, it loads instantaneous, instead of having to load itself off my harddrive's pagefile.

[MrPink]

note that in the task manager, your physical RAM still shows up under the "Page File" category in the performance tab. Maybe you already know this, but i'm just making sure.

Like, I have 2gb of RAM, and a 2gb page file, so it shows up as a 4gb Page File in the task manager. If you are really concerned about your new memory gong to waste, then just get Vista

[cottonvibes]

wait,
now i'm confused.

take a look at my task manager.




notice under the "PF Usage" bar I have 540mb.

i disabled PageFile on my HDD, so it shouldn't have anything.
meaning that windows still uses Page files even when you disable it.

[PCXL-Fan]

With the hack your using even though you're only using physical system memory windows still is fooled into believing you are using virtual memory.

If you look at your commited charge its pretty much the same as the file page. But that can't be. right? cuz that would mean you have absolutely everything alocated to virtual memory and your computer would run likelegless drunken sailor. So instead everything has been commited to physical memory.

The slowness in the taskbar your experiencing may be because the menus aren't even loaded into memory, or it could be the pre-set default delay in the menus. You can remove that delay via registry hack.

[MrPink]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

wait,
now i'm confused.

take a look at my task manager.




notice under the "PF Usage" bar I have 540mb.

i disabled PageFile on my HDD, so it shouldn't have anything.
meaning that windows still uses Page files even when you disable it.

right, "PF Useage" is your RAM
That's what I mean, PF does not mean windows is using a hard drive page file, its just that what windows presents as the total pagefile is actually the hard drive page file plus the total amount of physical memory.

It's confusing, but just because it's called PF Usage doesn't mean that windows automatically created another one without your consent.

See the "Commit Charge" field at the very bottom right corner of the task manager window? That is what would show whether or not your hard drive still had a pagefile. It was saying in your screeny "540 M / 3418 M", so bingo! Your memory useage is 540mb out of a potential 3.4gb of memory (and the only type of memory being used is your RAM, since you disabled the hard drive page file). If a hard drive page file was still up, then the value on the right would be higher (ie. a ~600MB hard drive pagefile plus the 3.4gb of physical RAM would give a total potential commit charge of 4gb).

Hope I cleared it up for you...

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by PCXL-Fan

The slowness in the taskbar your experiencing may be because the menus aren't even loaded into memory, or it could be the pre-set default delay in the menus. You can remove that delay via registry hack.

huh?
i never said i had slowness with the taskbar did I?


well i might've said i used to b4 when i had paging enabled.
but now that i have it disabled it dosn't do it anymore.

Originally Posted by MrPink

right, "PF Useage" is your RAM
That's what I mean, PF does not mean windows is using a hard drive page file, its just that what windows presents as the total pagefile is actually the hard drive page file plus the total amount of physical memory.

It's confusing, but just because it's called PF Usage doesn't mean that windows automatically created another one without your consent.

See the "Commit Charge" field at the very bottom right corner of the task manager window? That is what would show whether or not your hard drive still had a pagefile. It was saying in your screeny "540 M / 3418 M", so bingo! Your memory useage is 540mb out of a potential 3.4gb of memory (and the only type of memory being used is your RAM, since you disabled the hard drive page file). If a hard drive page file was still up, then the value on the right would be higher (ie. a ~600MB hard drive pagefile plus the 3.4gb of physical RAM would give a total potential commit charge of 4gb).

Hope I cleared it up for you...

ok thanks

i was getting confused by what all the different options ment.

its pretty stupid that they combine the PF and physical Ram in the graphs...

but thanks for clearing that up for me.