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virtual memory

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esikhobe   04-25-2006 at 08:15:24 PM

Hello guys
there is a question I have for many years.
what virtual memory is for? since I can buy any amount of DDR-RAM .
(I know the definition)
if we become free of virtual memory , does it eliminate the long delay that occurs because of the hard disk activity?

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site3op   04-25-2006 at 11:59:17 PM
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Virtual memory is used by the OS. The OS will reserve a good bit of the physical memory and attempt to use virtual memory for most things. Eliminating the use of virtual memory will leave you with running out of memory quickly. Advice for HD seek times. Set your upper and lower virtual memory sizes the same and at about 1 1/2 times the physical memory size. Make sure to defrag your drive after this to get the virtual memory areas on the HD back together. This should speed things up for you.

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sturm   04-26-2006 at 03:59:05 PM
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You can check to see whats in virtual memory by doing ctrl-alt-delete and select virtual memory usage in the view-> columns.
There isnt much delay from hard disk usage. Google and youll find tests that have been ran using all sorts of configs and there is no real world benefit to setting it one way or the other. The only one that made a difference was having NO virtual memory, which slowed the system down.
Now if you have 3 gigs or more of ram you shouldnt notice this slow down.

I have my page file on a seperate partition just to help on defrags.

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esikhobe   04-28-2006 at 11:51:58 AM
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I`ll give you an example.
I have 256 MB RAM and set maximum and minimum of virtual memory to 500 MB . my question is this:can I say, I have 756 MB RAM?

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sturm   04-28-2006 at 06:58:26 PM
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No. Virtual ram cant be counted. I could set my drive to use 40 gig of virtual memory if I wanted to. Doesnt mean I have 40 gig of system memory.

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esikhobe   04-28-2006 at 08:13:35 PM
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I don`t understand " The OS will reserve a good bit of the physical memory and attempt to use virtual memory for most things." that site3op says.
what is "good bit"?

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esikhobe   05-02-2006 at 06:56:14 PM
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In the other words "Does Windows find any gold on harddisk? that prefers it to DDR-RAM.I can buy any amount of DDR-RAM, but why it steel need VirtualMemory?

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emogoch   05-02-2006 at 08:17:25 PM
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Here is a pretty good article that discusses what VM is, and what you should consider about it.

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