How to make windows use more RAM instead of pagefile?

[rudrax]

This can turn out to be an interesting topic for all of us. I have 3 GB of RAM in my system and 64 bit operating system installed and apps are also 64 bit (if developer provides one). So I don't do any hard business with my laptop as I have heating issue. I don't play graphics intensive games, don't edit videos. The web browser is the only one thing that I need to keep which uses the most CPU and RAM in my system. With the web browser on the operation, the RAM fills up around 50% and rest of the RAM remains unused all the time. The remaining amount of RAM is 1.5 GB all the time. So, I'm wondering if I can keep more RAM in the business so that the CPU fetches data from RAM not from HDD (pagefile.sys). This way, the system will be more responsive than ever. I can feed at least 1 GB of RAM and others people who have more RAM can feed more accordingly.

Don't suggest RAMDisks.

Will preventing windows from creating pagefile or defining the pagefile size to minimum help?

So, how will we be doing this?

[locoJoe]

This is all just my opinion...of which you can find many on the web. Anyways IMO for a 64bit OS you should be running at least 4gb RAM. (even tho MS requirements for 64bit OS is only 2gb) Also IMO you will want (I would want) to run matching (paired) sticks. 2x2=4gb is the 'sweet spot' if you are running 4gb RAM. I guess what I am saying is that your 3gb RAM in its 'non-paired' configuration may be the reason (or atleast a contributing factor) why your processor is working harder. Remember all this I am saying is just my opinion, and also an opinion that was formed with very little information about your setup etc, etc. If I was you I would get some 2gb paired sticks for a total of 4gb RAM. Please make sure that ur mobo can accept 2gb sticks! I am assuming that with ur 3gb configuration that you are running a 1gb and a 2gb stick already. g/l

EDIT: Sorry I could not answer ur question specifically concerning the pagefile and HDD.

[rudrax]

Don't know why should MS recommend 4 GB of RAM for 64 bit modern OS. May be it does if you consider all MS craps that comes with the OS, like, media center, windows defender, security essentials, unnecessesary services, features etc. may be with these, they may fill up around 2GB or more. In this case 4 GB may be required. Mine is compacted as per my need and I always have 1.5 GB to spare out of my 3 GB. I'm running windows 8.1 pro x64 and it never lags due to RAM.

Thanks for putting your opinion though. Keep in touch.

Where is that fat a$$ fella dcs18, BTW? Might be getting ready for the night. :rofl:

[A.lemane]

if u have a heating issue then u should keep the pagefile + don't use Firefox or any bas\ed source ! use Opera or chrome

AMD ?

[Zapdude]

Actually the pagefile is not used unless the system needs to use it. I mean, if your RAM is not full then the system uses your RAM and only on the event of 100% RAM usage it will resort to utilizing the page file.

That said, i keep my page file on a fixed size (512MB) just in case and because some apps "prefer" to find a page file. Now the real suspect is your heating problem, if you have your machine many years without cleaning it or changing the thermal paste then it is possible that this is the cause. i would measure the temps on idle state with an app like HWmonitor and if they were high i would clean the fans and re apply a good thermal paste on the cpu like arctic silver. Laptop fans tend to build up dust on the fan fins. I hope this helps :D

[eurobyn]

use a ssd drive for the os and you are fine .

the speed comes from the bottleneck and this will Always be the harddrive you run youre os from.

give youre pc the boost it needs , a harddisk upgrade (ssd)

[Ballistic Gelatin]

I have been a user of jv16 PowerTools for many years. It has a feature ("Speed up my computer") that forces the Windows core and device drivers to run in RAM and not in the Page file. The software's publisher recommends that you use this feature only if you have a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (for Vista and Windows 7). I currently have a single 8 GB memory module (OEM), and I've never encountered any problems with excessive writing to pagefile.sys.

[rudrax]

if u have a heating issue then u should keep the pagefile + don't use Firefox or any bas\ed source ! use Opera or chrome

AMD ?

I can never be comfortable with any browser other than Firefox.

Intel.

Actually the pagefile is not used unless the system needs to use it. I mean, if your RAM is not full then the system uses your RAM and only on the event of 100% RAM usage it will resort to utilizing the page file.

That said, i keep my page file on a fixed size (512MB) just in case and because some apps "prefer" to find a page file. Now the real suspect is your heating problem, if you have your machine many years without cleaning it or changing the thermal paste then it is possible that this is the cause. i would measure the temps on idle state with an app like HWmonitor and if they were high i would clean the fans and re apply a good thermal paste on the cpu like arctic silver. Laptop fans tend to build up dust on the fan fins. I hope this helps :D

May be you are right. Pagefile may cache HDD data that are not found in RAM. But why let 512 MB of pagefile to be there if I already have 1500 MB free. And in resource monitor, I can see that the pagefile is being used.

I'm aware of my heating issue and I periodically open and clean my laptop casing cleaning up the dirt and applying new thermal paste.

I have been a user of jv16 PowerTools for many years. It has a feature ("Speed up my computer") that forces the Windows core and device drivers to run in RAM and not in the Page file. The software's publisher recommends that you use this feature only if you have a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (for Vista and Windows 7). I currently have a single 8 GB memory module (OEM), and I've never encountered any problems with excessive writing to pagefile.sys.

Yeah, that option in jv16 is really useful.

use a ssd drive for the os and you are fine .

the speed comes from the bottleneck and this will Always be the harddrive you run youre os from.

give youre pc the boost it needs , a harddisk upgrade (ssd)

Yeah, the hybrid drives can play a role here but you know what, the RAM is way faster than a SSD.

[VileTouch]

here's a pro tip. if you have less than 4gb ram and a weak proccessor (not an i5,i7 or equivalent), you're much better off running on 32 bits. seriously!

another thing: of course you can simply tell windows to not use the pagefile, but some programs...including windows itself doesn't take kindly to running without one.

you might think 3gb is a lot, but the truth is...it's not. sorry to burst your bubble.

[rudrax]

here's a pro tip. if you have less than 4gb ram and a weak proccessor (not an i5,i7 or equivalent), you're much better off running on 32 bits. seriously!

another thing: of course you can simply tell windows to not use the pagefile, but some programs...including windows itself doesn't take kindly to running without one.

you might think 3gb is a lot, but the truth is...it's not. sorry to burst your bubble.

Quite an amusing input, really. I know, 3 GB is 1 GB short of what modern system ships with that are born in "core-i" era. This is not recommended to run 64-bit modern windows. But why? Because default windows ships with many unnecessary things and functions that you may not need. Including all of those, it makes sense that you might need 4 GB. Although, trust me, you will find 2.5 GB of 4 GB always resting even though you run default windows (unconfiguared). If you used 3rd party RAM hungry app, then it's true that 4 GB is recommended and that's how, I guess, windows presents the recommendation criteria. Forget about 3 GB, I have recently built a entry level PC for my friend with just 2 GB of RAM. The same windows 8.1 x64 that I use, runs as butter in his system without any lags.

So, it's not about recommendation (well, if one can meet that, that's appealing), it's about how you can fit things according to your requirements withing the limit that you have and without compromising.

[VileTouch]

where to start?...ok, i guess i'll just split this in parts,said Jack the ripper.

Quite an amusing input, really. I know, 3 GB is 1 GB short of what modern system ships with that are born in "core-i" era. This is not recommended to run 64-bit modern windows. But why?

for starters you cannot use more than 4gb ram in a 32bit os. (2^32 − 1 = 4294967295 = 4 GiB − 1)

Because default windows ships with many unnecessary things and functions that you may not need. Including all of those, it makes sense that you might need 4 GB.

it has NOTHING to do with unnecessary things. the actual application that you are actively using can allocate up to 4gb to work on 32 bits but you also access the data in 32 bits chunks: 0x80005DC0 for example. in 64 bits, that same chunk would look like this 0x0000000080005DC0. which makes it larger, but also more accurate, and of course it's expected that you have more ram to work with in the first place.
oh and did you notice that your processor is working twice as hard yet? if it doesn't come naturally to it (like in the case of a "core i") you're not doing it any favors.

Although, trust me, you will find 2.5 GB of 4 GB always resting even though you run default windows (unconfigured).

ram does not only contain user data. it also has everything the computer needs to function...such as device drivers. in earlier OSes things were never put in memory until the last moment that it was needed because of how little of it there was and how expensive it was to obtain it. nowadays you have all kinds of drivers and services working in the background that you need NOT to worry about. windows manages ram automatically now (since Vista actually) so there is NOTHING in memory that is not needed any more.

If you used 3rd party RAM hungry app, then it's true that 4 GB is recommended and that's how, I guess, windows presents the recommendation criteria.

like a web browser? *cough*

Forget about 3 GB, I have recently built a entry level PC for my friend with just 2 GB of RAM. The same windows 8.1 x64 that I use, runs as butter in his system without any lags.

windows 7 (32 bits) NEEDS at least 2gb for itself to run without any hiccups. and sure enough you can boot windows to the desktop very smoothly with 2gb only...but then what? unless you want a computer to look at the desktop only, it's not going to be any good because you actually WANT to use a "3rd party" app. btw, you mention "3rd party" like it's a bad thing....

So, it's not about recommendation (well, if one can meet that, that's appealing), it's about how you can fit things according to your requirements withing the limit that you have and without compromising.

yeah well, if you are at the top of your budget then you take whatever you can, but if you can help it you're better off upgrading (more ram) or downgrading (32 bits)


....and that's all i'm going to say about it.

here's a bone:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/clearing-up-the-3264-bit-memory-limit-confusion/3124

....good boy!

[unknownasphyxiated]

try this??

http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required

[A.lemane]

if u have a heating issue then u should keep the pagefile + don't use Firefox or any bas\ed source ! use Opera or chrome

AMD ?

I can never be comfortable with any browser other than Firefox.

Intel.

that's because it is so fast but so heavy i only use it on my i7 pc (8 cores)

but when u try it on a thin pc @@

[rudrax]

where to start?...ok, i guess i'll just split this in parts,said Jack the ripper.

Quite an amusing input, really. I know, 3 GB is 1 GB short of what modern system ships with that are born in "core-i" era. This is not recommended to run 64-bit modern windows. But why?

for starters you cannot use more than 4gb ram in a 32bit os. (2^32 − 1 = 4294967295 = 4 GiB − 1)

Who told you that I'm using 32 bit OS? :lol:

Because default windows ships with many unnecessary things and functions that you may not need. Including all of those, it makes sense that you might need 4 GB.

it has NOTHING to do with unnecessary things. the actual application that you are actively using can allocate up to 4gb to work on 32 bits but you also access the data in 32 bits chunks: 0x80005DC0 for example. in 64 bits, that same chunk would look like this 0x0000000080005DC0. which makes it larger, but also more accurate, and of course it's expected that you have more ram to work with in the first place.

oh and did you notice that your processor is working twice as hard yet? if it doesn't come naturally to it (like in the case of a "core i") you're not doing it any favors.

Well, i3 is a 64-bit processor and so it can manage a 64-bit address in one instance, not twice. :lol:

Although, trust me, you will find 2.5 GB of 4 GB always resting even though you run default windows (unconfigured).

ram does not only contain user data. it also has everything the computer needs to function...such as device drivers. in earlier OSes things were never put in memory until the last moment that it was needed because of how little of it there was and how expensive it was to obtain it. nowadays you have all kinds of drivers and services working in the background that you need NOT to worry about. windows manages ram automatically now (since Vista actually) so there is NOTHING in memory that is not needed any more.

Did I ever said that? Windows has alot more function/features that every users may not want to be in their system. Like the "windows search indexer", "spooler service" and so on... :lol:

If you used 3rd party RAM hungry app, then it's true that 4 GB is recommended and that's how, I guess, windows presents the recommendation criteria.

like a web browser? *cough*

Didn't you ever heard of Photoshop, Video Editor, Animation maker etc.? :lol:

Forget about 3 GB, I have recently built a entry level PC for my friend with just 2 GB of RAM. The same windows 8.1 x64 that I use, runs as butter in his system without any lags.

windows 7 (32 bits) NEEDS at least 2gb for itself to run without any hiccups. and sure enough you can boot windows to the desktop very smoothly with 2gb only...but then what? unless you want a computer to look at the desktop only, it's not going to be any good because you actually WANT to use a "3rd party" app. btw, you mention "3rd party" like it's a bad thing....

That's just a recommendation. I have a practical experience of running 64-bit windows 8.1 in 2 GB RAM like butter, heard of butter? - of course you do :lol:

Booting to the desktop smoothly, that's nothing. I have done all basic tasks smoothly there. I have asked my friend to add 2 GB more RAM for better performance but he declined as he has faced no lag with 2 GB.

So, it's not about recommendation (well, if one can meet that, that's appealing), it's about how you can fit things according to your requirements withing the limit that you have and without compromising.

yeah well, if you are at the top of your budget then you take whatever you can, but if you can help it you're better off upgrading (more ram) or downgrading (32 bits)

....and that's all i'm going to say about it.

here's a bone:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/clearing-up-the-3264-bit-memory-limit-confusion/3124

....good boy!

:lmao:

[SnakeMasteR]

Sue your friend to hand out the other 2 GB RAM or sleep with his girlfriend to force him, then you get 2 GB back of what Windows Kernel takes from you, problem solved. :P