Creating a ram drive

[TVC15]

I have an obscene amount of RAM in my machine (768 MB) and I have decided to perform a little experiment. What I would like to do is create of RAM Drive of 500MB and use this as my swap file.

So far I have succesfully created the ram drive using the XMSDSK (and following the instructions at this web site: http://www.speedcorp.net/guides/ramdrive/)

Unfortunately, when I go to control panel/system/performance/virtual memory and opt to specify my own vitual memory settings my RAM drive is not listed in the choice of available drives. (my operating system is Windows 98 Second Edition, by the way!

Does anybody know whether what I am trying to do is possible and, if so, how do you do it!!

Hope you can help,

Regards,

Andy

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Up every evening 'bout half eight or nine,

I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine.

[Dinosaur]

I am almost certain that you cannot do that.

Think about it. The Swap file is used to store data or programs when there is not enough room in memory. You want to allocate 500MB of memory for use as the Swap file. This will cause less memory being available for active programs & data, resulting in more demands for Swap File space.

This could only work if you did not need a Swap file.

BTW: I wonder what goes on with really huge amounts of RAM. Might the Swap file not get used?

If I try to run too masny aplications at once and virtual memory cannot cope, does the OS hang up or does it merely refuse to load another program?




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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[mjc]

Okay, TVC15

After trying to hunt down info for you I came up with a few things about making a ramdrive for the swapfile, most of them said either don't do it or why bother, but they were mainly talking about systems with 64MB of RAM or less. Now you have more memory than the Win9x kernel can effectively use so in order to run most efficiently you should limit the amount of memory it uses, probably no more than 512MB (some would say 256MB), so a 500MB ramdrive would be ok as far as that goes, but with that amount of memory you do not really need a very large swapfile to begin...this (http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/Swapfile_Optimization/Swapfile_Optimization_13.htm) article gives some info and tips on swapfile management, in general. Also in the guide you followed to set up the ramdrive it shows how to setup your IE cache and temp directories in the ramdrive...which may be a good idea, except that if you use it as a download directory the files you downloaded will be lost on a reboot, unless you use a program to save the contents on shutdown.

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mjc
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[hacker]

Hi,

Check this article out and see if it helps.
http://www.tech-review.com/review.pl?id=238

Good luck!

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I was called "hacker" before there was a HeathKit.