1 GB RAM under Windows

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Phantasm66

Posts: 4,909   +8
OK, here is the deal.

I have just upgraded to 1 GB RAM (PC2100, DDR-SDRAM) and am looking for some advise from anyone who is currently using this amount of memory.... Not in a server but in a workstation as I now am.

Because.... Call me a monkey's uncle but I am sure that performance is a little slower. I have followed a couple of the tweaks on www.techspotlight.com as regards memory and have used performance monitor to determine that my page file could be made MANY times smaller than it was....

But I just want to know if anyone has any extra tips or golden words of knowledge to impart....

I am currently using 2 x 256 MB plus 1 x 512 but am going to change to 2 x 512 MB which I think may yield better results.

Memory is mixed brand, 256's are Crucial and 512 is kingston, all are cas 2.5 I think (pretty sure...)
 
As you may know, I have 1.5GB PC2100 DDR Crucial, 3 x 512 modules. I'm running Windows XP Pro.
I never ran this configuration with less memory so I don't know what it would be like with less. I did speed things up a bit by making my pagefile 335MB separate partition as I've noted before. I also played in the registry and set it for large system cache and not to page the kernal files(this forces the OS files to load into RAM as you probably already know) Seems like there may have been a couple more things I changed in there but the most signifigant were those two. I saw a pretty good difference in the responsiveness of my system.

I could have gotten rid of the pagefile but some of my apps don't like not having it.

your problem may be resulting from the mixed brands of RAM, I know some brands don't mix well but I've never used Kingston and Crucial together so I can't speculate on that.
 
In;
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Control\Session Manager\ Memory Management]
Set
DisablePagingExecutive to 1
LargeSystemCache to 1

or;


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001
 
OK, this is related to my problem but not to the memory: I discovered that some newly installed virus software which I did at the same time as the memory upgrade (try not to do 2 upgrades at once, Phant.... ;) ) was scanning all icon files for viruses....

....This was resulting in the slowness I was experiencing. When I told it to exclude this file type (I don't think you are going to get an icon virus) things got better.

I then changed the 2 x 256 MB DIMMs for 1 x 512 MB, so I have 2 x 512 MB DIMM now, 1 crucial and 1 kingston. That made things better too.

I then followed the registry tweaks included by Storm and Thomas and things are even better. Reducing the size of the page file to a smaller size (with performance monitor as my guide) also helped things a great deal too.
 
I have 2Gb of SDRAM, and yes having more RAM can be slower, simply because on occasions more Bandwidth contention can take place, as read/write operation slow down memory operations and so contention is not such an issue. Also, I think windows spends slightly more time managing the memory tables when there is more ram.

My tweaking program can alter the settings that were mentioned and also some others which may increase your performance.
 
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