20

I have 8gigs of RAM in this machine. I never really use more than say 4gigs (includes my virtual machines I use for dev testing).

What can I do with this extra space to best improve system performance?

Some guesses:

  • Improve my disk performance by turning off the pagefile?
  • Improve my disk performance by increasing the disk cache amount?
  • Move temporary folders to a ramdisk?
  • Somehow configure SuperFetch to cache more? (currently 1.5gigs)
  • Any other suggestions??

This is on 64-bit Windows 7.

Nick Whaley
  • 681

7 Answers7

23

Don't disable your page file. See here.

Community
  • 1
John Fouhy
  • 3,225
6

Try putting portable Firefox on a ramdisk and enjoy a dramatic speed increase. Dataram is free and saves its contents to hard disk when you shut down the computer (and optionally at regular intervals).

CGA
  • 3,829
5

If you want, you can try loading some of your most-used programs in a RAM Disk to make them load faster. I tend to just leave it alone and let Superfetch do it's job. When I leave my computer on for a couple days it's not unusual to see it cache 6GB of programs and files.

Dan Walker
  • 9,397
4

move the browser cache to RAM disk.

disabling virtual memory is certainly an option, but may have a negative impact on certain programs that explicitly require paging, but then, it's only a few mouse clicks away to turn back on :)

3

Let Windows manage the memory. It does a much better job than you can, even if you understand how it works, which you probably don't. A RAMDISK is almost always a poor use of memory. Disabling the pagefile will more often than not impair performance.

user43161
  • 260
2

These days the "slowness" of a PC are most likely caused by your harddisk. You should try to use your ram to tackle this weakness.

Create a big ram disk partition (~3GB), set your frequently used programs to use that partition as temporary drive. You'll be amazed by how fast your programs will become.

deddebme
  • 3,814
0

Open all your favorite application on window startup. then you can reach them from taskbar. Play many games at cone. Never close them. Just use ALT+TAB when you get bored.

Don't disable windows page file because when you are saving from disk, you are adding more traffic to the ram bandwidth. That would create a bottleneck on the bandwidth when you are using the programs which matter more.

Uğur Gümüşhan
  • 1,444