Tweaking
your System Memory
Last
Updated on July 18, 2000 by Thomas
McGuire - Page 2/9
Hard drive setup
(Cont.)
Disable Synchronous Transfers:
There are 2 methods of transferring data over SCSI cables, Synchronous
& Asynchronous mode. Asynchronous mode transfers use an
interlocked handshake method where a device (adapter or drive)
cannot do the next data transfer operation until it receives
positive acknowledgment that the other device received the
last data transfer properly. Synchronous transfer mode permits
the sending device to send multiple data packets without
receiving acknowledgment that the receiver actually received
every data packet sent. As a result, more data can be
sent/received before acknowledgement is required. You should only
tick this if you are experiencing problems with a hard drive(s),
e.g. overlapped requests, as performance is slower when
Synchronous Transfers is Disabled. Leave it unticked.
Enable
DMA support on your drives. Right click on My
Computer, select Properties.
Select the Hardware
tab, then the Device
Manager button. Open IDE
ATA/ATAPI controllers, then open Primary
& Secondary IDE Channel. Select the Advanced settings tab.
For
Transfer Mode you should select DMA if available. PIO Only
is much slower than DMA transfer rates & the Page File
benefits from a faster data transfer rate, assuming the hard
drive(s) support it. Click Ok
& reboot your system for the changes to take effect. NOTE – If you
have no other IDE devices on an IDE channel, then selecting None
will reduce boot time.
Enable ATA/UDMA 66 support, assuming your hard drive(s)
supports it that is. By default
in Windows 2000, support for ATA/UDMA66 is disabled
(On Intel chipsets at least). Click on Start,
Run, type in regedit
& hit Enter. Go
to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\
Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
\0000]. Add a New
DWORD value entitled EnableUDMA66
& give it a value of 1
to enable support for UDMA/ATA 66, 0
disables it. This can greatly improve hard drive performance
if supported, remember the Page file is located on your hard
drive(s) too; the faster the data transfers the faster your
Page File is. NOTE – This is not
the same as enabling DMA support as shown previously.
Memory
dumps
Windows
2000, much like previous versions of NT, will dump the
contents of memory to Memory.dmp in the event of a Stop, or other fatal error. You can
then use this Memory.dmp
file for debugging the cause of this error. If
this is your sort of thing you'll need
to have your Paging File set to (at least) RAM
+ 12MB for the file to be created.
Personally,
I don't find this of much use to myself, nor should it be of
much use to most users out there. To edit the Memory
dump settings, right click on My Computer, select the Advanced
tab, then the Startup
and Recovery button. You should concern yourself with the
settings under the Write
Debugging Information heading.
Depending
on the option you select you can have No memory dump, to a
Complete memory dump. If you select the Complete
Memory Dump option then you will need to have set your
Page File to RAM + 12MB
or more. With Kernel
Memory Dump you may get away with less than this.
I'd
personally recommend setting it to (none)
unless you are into debugging crashes. Ask you System/Network
Administrator for more information if possible.
Why
concern yourself with this? Well, if you have your machine
setup to write these Memory dumps you need a certain amount of
Page File in order to do so, hence it effectively limits what
you can do with your Page File settings. If you select Complete Memory Dump then follow the recommended Minimum of RAM
+ 12MB for the Page File, or use RAM
* 1.5. You should also skip the Calculating
Paging File size section.
For those of you who selected another Memory dump
option you can read the Calculating
Paging File size section, which will help you discover
more optimal Page File settings.
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