Windows 7 Ram advice please

miseryguts

New Member
I have to admit I don't know much about how Ram works (didn't think anything over 6GB made any difference)

..but, was just looking at some matched kit's on Amazon & came across this explanation of why over 6GB of Ram isn't pointless:

"I concur with the other reviewers, in that this RAM is a very solid choice. It's plenty fast enough for all keen enthusiasts. However, I wanted to write a review for anyone who is considering why they should buy 12GB of RAM rather than, say, 6GB. This is especially pertinent now that RAM prices have plummeted.
The fact that one can buy 12GB of high quality RAM so cheaply means that many people will end up purchasing it even though for most users, having this much RAM will be well above their needs. Let me tell you all now why in actual fact, 12GB is both useful - and for a lot of people - an excellent choice!
First of all you need to understand how Windows handles memory. No matter how much RAM you have, Windows *always* creates virtual memory. This is a space on your hard drive (typically half as much space as you have RAM) that Windows uses to simulate RAM. It does this because back in the day, people would need more memory than they had and so using hard drive space was a cheap solution. The problem is that even though computers now generally ship with 4GB+ of memory, this virtual memory still exists - and what's worse is that there are plenty of programs that default to using it. So even if you had 12GB of RAM (i.e. well beyond all your needs), you'd still need virtual memory activated, as some programs (games a lot of the time demand 1.5GB of virtual memory, for example) will simply refuse to load - in spite of the fact that you have enough system memory already!
There is a way to solve this issue quite neatly. What we do is use all this extra RAM to create a RAMDisk. This is like the opposite of virtual memory - it is space in your RAM that is used to mimic a hard disk. There are plenty of options out there - I used memory.dataram.com's freeware, which will create a 4GB RAMDisk at no cost. The steps needed to make it work are as follows:
1) Disable your current virtual memory. (You'll get warnings, don't worry about them.) Reboot.
2) Install your chosen RAMDisk software. The one I mentioned is dead simple to use. You may be asked to confirm you want to install some drivers, that's fine. Also, if you want a RAMDisk larger than 2GB, you'll need to select FAT32 (FAT16 limits all disk partition sizes to 2GB). I would recommend FAT32 - I went for a 4GB RAMDisk so that my 12GB of RAM is divided in a ratio 2:1. (This means that, superficially, I 'only' have 8GB of RAM available in my system now.) Now, you have a new drive appearing in Explorer.
3) Go back to your Virtual Memory settings, and choose 'Custom Size'. If you try and let Windows do it all automatically, it'll say the disk is too small. (What it worries about is the drive being filled up with *other* stuff, but we're dedicating it to VM so this isn't a problem.) I set my minimum to 2048MB, and maximum to just a little below the disk size (4000MB). Apply those settings, and you're done!
Now, you're actually using all 12GB with some purpose. There are tangible differences, too. Hard disks (especially magnetic disks) are VERY slow compared to RAM. So programs that default to using virtual memory will run a lot quicker. On top of this, your hard drive is now no longer trying to do two things simultaneously - demanding programs (especially games) now aren't writing to the hard drive twice over (loading and using VM). And of course, you recover a few GB of memory from your hard drive. In my case, I use an SSD for Windows, and so since it is a smaller drive, space is precious"

This sounds very interesting, would the same procedure be applicable to 16 or even 24GB of Ram..? & would it help with game loading etc..?

Thanks.



 
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