virtual memory or whatever its called

Warwick Bassmonkey said:
Roughly translated as, "I went 3 years without even getting a sniff of a lady's front bottom."

I remember you telling me you'd forgotten what they looked like.

Smug now though, aren't we?


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!


:jump: :D :jump: :D :jump: :D :jump:
 
i personally set the paging file to the same exact (fixed) size of my physical ram. i don't want to have to retrieve ANYTHING that is supposedly in 'memory' from the hard drive. hard drives are slow and have seek times (in the millesecond range) whereas ram is more or less instant.
i do have to wonder what is would be like to use one of those usb flash storage drives (like a keychain-- costs about 40 quid for 256mb)
for virtual memory/pagefile... as flash memory is almost as fast as ram...
but i digress...
 
oCeLoT vs vectorSelector said:
i do have to wonder what is would be like to use one of those usb flash storage drives (like a keychain-- costs about 40 quid for 256mb)
for virtual memory/pagefile... as flash memory is almost as fast as ram...
but i digress...

USB2 might be acceptable, but the bandwith of USB1 would be restrictive. 12Mbps is pathetiic compared with an ATA-100 disk. And no disk can compete with the 6.4GBytes/sec through a matched pair of PC3200 ram sticks.

But why spend 40 quid on a 256MB USB fob for virtual RAM, when real RAM is only 30 quid for the same capacity?
 
oCeLoT vs vectorSelector said:
i personally set the paging file to the same exact (fixed) size of my physical ram. i don't want to have to retrieve ANYTHING that is supposedly in 'memory' from the hard drive.

By the way, setting your page file to be the same size as physical RAM won't stop it paging, it just means you've got less space to page into. To guarantee no paging, you've gotta turn it off altogether, but you'd only be wise to do that if you've got plenty of RAM (e.g. 1GB) and you know you're not going to exhaust it.
 
1GB is not so much anymore and it'll make your PC run like a 3ghz machine even with an old thoroughbred processor. If you're having to use the swap file when making music then you've not got enough ram.

RAM is fuckin expensive to be honest, I remeber just b4 the earthquake, 256 133sdram was under £20, now DDR400 256mb is the wrong side of £60 for Crucial, Kingston, etc more if you go for some of the gamers ram.

Don't forget that if you've got an AMD processor you don't need to run dual channel ram as they don't run the HUGE FSB speeds of the newer intel P4's. It's been proven that running dual channel on an AMD processor will only give up to 10% performance increase MAX and in only certain applications.
 
norty303 said:
RAM is fuckin expensive to be honest, I remeber just b4 the earthquake, 256 133sdram was under £20, now DDR400 256mb is the wrong side of £60 for Crucial, Kingston, etc more if you go for some of the gamers ram.

I found out with great surprise that RAM prices vary in time, it can go up and down and up again, the same way as the stock market, I've been explained that depends by many factors, especially by availability on the market. When there was a major disaster in Taiwan or somewhere there, probably an earthquake, it stopped the whole RAM supply from that part of the planet making price rise like hell and here in europe was very difficult to find RAM in shops.
 
to truly set the page file i think you have to defrag the drive too

..or this that just a load of old codgers bollocks? :grandad:
 
Well, you set the swapfile to a minimal size, defrag the drive and then reset the swapfile to the desired size, which gives you a completely contiguous (unfragmented) swapfile for a slight speed increase - if you want to be a completist though, go for it! ;)

J.
 
It helps a lot if the swapfile is on a different harddrive (not just partition) then the win install too. Makes swapping much faster.
 
all very interesting and confusing...

i have a related question, but my computer literacy is roughly 'spot goes for a walk' level.

about 6 months ago i bought a dell PC primarily for music production. it has 512 ram and a 1.4ghz pentium (iirc), and i'm currently using an omnistudio usb soundcard. i use mainly FLStudio, Reason, Cubase.

would purchasing more ram - say, another 512, which is not hugely expensive compared with a new machine - make a real difference to my computer's ability to run lots of [insert synth/plugin here]?

any help much appreciated!!!
 
seuss said:
would purchasing more ram - say, another 512, which is not hugely expensive compared with a new machine - make a real difference to my computer's ability to run lots of [insert synth/plugin here]?

Short answer - yes.

Long answer later (there's a few caveats).

I wouldn't recommend doing computer-intensive production with less than a gig of RAM.

J.
 
imak said:
to truly set the page file i think you have to defrag the drive too

..or this that just a load of old codgers bollocks? :grandad:

To properly defrag the pagefile, do this :
1 ) Turn off swap file alltogether, then reboot machine.
2 ) defrag drive ( do not use the one shipped with windows, use speed disk or diskkeeper )
3 ) when complete re-enable swap file ( set min/max the same ) and reboot machine.
4 ) Defrag agin......

Defragging a drive with an active ( fragmented ) pagefile will not work the way you want, as the deragger will not be allowed to re-arrange a file in use.

Swap files are also ( apparently ) more efficient at the start of the drive. Speed disk ( at least ) will let you play with this.

But as mentioned, the fastest swap file will be on a disk completely on it's own, and of course in one fragment.

Some M$ guff can be read here :
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314482
 
JPsychodelicacy said:
I'd need Goz to clarify, but I'm pretty sure that you're going to want the fastest RAM you can afford for your next PC, so while you *can* expand the RAM in your current machine, it might be false economy to do so. Of course, that depends how old your current machine is - My old machine ran on PC133 (Quick for 1999), my new one runs on PC2700 [333DDR].

Only a month late! :lol:

TBH however you look at it ... if you haven't got enough RAM an extra half gig will be better than using the hard disk (by a factor of a 1000 or so).

TBH, and i appreciate i know little on the subject, i can't see synths as being the most bandwidth hungry of things. 96KHz 24-bit audio (mono) is only 288K/sec. Considering DDR333 has a total of 2.6Gig/sec that means you have enough bandwidth to stream over 9,000 high quality audio streams from memory at the same time ... ok you couldn't do f**k all with them but i think you get the idea ;)
 
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