pc question

I'm in the middle of upgrading my computer. Right now i have a 1.0 GHz processor w/ 768MB of RAM.

I'm starting over from scratch and i'm gonna have (among other things) 3.06GHz processor w/ the same 767 of RAM.

I was looking at my computer the other day, and i came accross the virtual memory function on xp.

I'm not really all that computer savy, but i know enough to do some stuff, and i was just wondering if anone could help me out w/ this.

what does it do? i know how it works, setting aside HD space and all that, but i was wondering what performace boost am i gonna get? I tried resting the amount to a higher amount, and i noticed a drop in the useage of the RAM. does this help any? does it help when running multiple programs? large programs like games? thanks for your help!

Well first off. Answer these questions for me.

What are you using this pc for? What will you use it for?


How much you looking to spend?


Those are the 2 big questions i need to know before i can give you more recommendations

http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Um virtual memory helps to a point but it also uses a HD which is a lot slower than RAM so its a give and take. I'd set your virtual memory at 2x's your RAM so in your case 1536MB...

Virtual memory - I would just let windows handle it. Its really not going to help in games or much.

As I said post answers to questions or aim me.

ok thanks.

It was set to match my RAM, but i incresed it, and i noticed a significat increase in general speed. I think it was only cuz my cpu is so slow at the moment, but after i upgrade i don't think it will matter any more.

ffactoryxx i already have my parts and everything bought, and my dad's helping me put it together and everything, so i don't really need any help. I was just wondering what virtual memory was and how it helped.

i'll prob have about a gig and a half (of virtual mem) set up when i set up the new machine, and hopefully that'll be good enough. I just want it to take care of all the background stuff so then when i'm actually doing something w/ the machine it'll be a lil faster

If you have more than one hard drive, it's best to put the paging file on one your OS doesn't reside on.

[quote049eb96ca0="ffactoryxx"]Well first off. Answer these questions for me.

What are you using this pc for? What will you use it for?


How much you looking to spend?


Those are the 2 big questions i need to know before i can give you more recommendations[/quote049eb96ca0]

Looks like 3 questions to me.

[quote7880bb95b4="Wolfeman"]http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Um virtual memory helps to a point but it also uses a HD which is a lot slower than RAM so its a give and take. I'd set your virtual memory at 2x's your RAM so in your case 1536MB...[/quote7880bb95b4]

I was taught that VRAM should be set to 2.5x your RAM.. Swap partitions should be set at 2x.. but either one should be fine shrug

Yea. I really think that it set to windows handled would be the best bet.

Also putting paging on another hardrive is ok in some situations but the difference is negligeble.

All those 2x and 2.5x rules are bogus, because the ideal amount really varies from system to system. As was said, it's generally best to just let Windows handle it. I used to be a firm believer in setting a fixed size and not letting Windows grow/shrink it, but have since learned that it's NOT the best way to go.

Another myth is that if you have a large amount of system RAM, like 2GB, that you don't need any swap space and should disable it. NOT TRUE! This could impact performance terribly and cause your system to become unstable. The reason is that almost every Win32 application allocates far more memory than they actually use. Windows' memory manager is smart enough to map this allocated but unused memory space to virtual memory, allowing more physical RAM for other processes. When you disable swap altogether, this wasted RAM space cannot be swapped to disk, and therefore consumes physical RAM, of which there is a limited supply. Run a few RAM-greedy apps and suddenly your system is crawling, freezing, or otherwise unstable.

Here is a good guide to go by

http//www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

I don't necessarily agree with every one of his points, but it's a well written article and has a lot of good tidbits.

2x is a good rule of thumb. I don't trust Windows to handle it )

ya windows set it up to match what my physical RAM was, the 768. I upped the amount, using a previously set up partition on the HD. it's only a 20 gb HD, but 1 gb was partitoned off. I set that up along w/ what windows had, and it ran a lot faster.

I have a 100 gb HD that i'll be using for the new computer, so i'll have a bit more space as well lol I'll prolly set aside 2 gb, cuz the way i look at it if you're not using the space anyway, it couldn't hurt lol