Did I waste my money on extra memory?

[OuTpaTienT]

Don't let Windoze manage the swap file. You set it at a fixed size. 256mb would be ok, or maybe even a little smaller. I have 256mb RAM and I set my swap at 128mb.

After doing that, do this tweak to stop Windoze from using the swap file unless absolutely necessary. In your SYSTEM.INI file add this line under the
[386Enh] section:
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1


This way Windoze will always use your physical memory first before going to the swap.

And no, you didn't waste your money on the extra ram. It will get used, expecially if you're the type to open many applications at one time. You might not notice a huge speed difference at first but you'll be glad it's there. If you're doubtful, then just use the full 256mb for a week or so then pull 128mb out of the machine...I bet you notice it then.

[wyvrn]

Win98 will always allocate a swap file as part of virtual memory, unless you tell it to use memory first and hard disk space second. Start | Run | Msconfig and go to the System.ini tab. Open the [386enh] section and make a new line called "conservativeswapfileusage=1" (without the quotes of course) and reboot your computer. With 256 MB of RAM, you swap file should start at 0 and only increase as you near capacity of RAM.

[OuTpaTienT]

btw, you should NOT be running Norton Crashguard on a regular basis. It's notorious for causing crashes.

[Jonty]

Thanks guys for your reassurance and advice, I will try this and see how it goes.

You are right about Norton stuff causing crashes. I used to have Norton System Doctor running in the background but got fed up with it causing problems - I ran it last night for the first time in weeks and what did it do?? You guessed right!! I think System Monitor and Speed Disk are good however.

I bought my new memory at Crucial. I ordered it 9.45 Thursday evening and it was in my hands at 7.45 Saturday morning! That was free delivery too! Mind you we have to pay much more for our computer parts in the UK. My 128mb PC133 cost £46.52 (US$65.13 or thereabouts).

[Jonty]

As memory is so cheap at present I thought I would add another 128mb making the total in my system 256mb.

I installed it this morning but quite frankly cannot see any improvement at all.

I'm running Windows 98 and before I added the extra memory noted that the swap file was always between about 90 to 130mb, obviously that was with several applications open. With double the memory the swap file is still this size and in fact grows even more when I open a few more things.

The swap file is managed by Windows, its been optimised by Norton Speed Disk and is at the start of the disc. I would've thought that with the extra memory the swap file would have been smaller as there would be more ram available for applications? Or doesn't the swap file work this way??

At this moment the swap file size is 100mb but the only applications open are Internet Explorer, Outlook, Zonealarm, a couple of files and Norton Crashguard, System monitor etc. Why is the file so big? I understood that the swap file only came into play when ram was full???

The system says there is 256mb installed but whats a good test for this extra memory? What is there to do so that I can say 'ah, that happened/didn't happen with just 128mb'?

Any suggestions appreciated!

[SiteCharts.com]

You will probably go to Win2K / WinNT / WinXP to get the most out of your 256MB RAM.
I have 256MB too under WinXP and my Swapfile is 20MB (same under Win2K).
20MB !!!!!
Only when opening lots of programs (and I mean that!!) it grows... 56MB ... 154MB.
154MB is the biggest Swapfile I ever had under WinXP (editing a few poster-size pictures in Photoshop, running a Video editing Software and extracting a 300MB Zip-file.

[samwichse]

Does the "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" thing work in Windows 95 too?

[OuTpaTienT]

You shouldn't need it in Win95. My understanding is that setting makes Win98 treat it's swapfile the same way Win95 use to.

But I don't know if the various Win95 versions (Win95a, b & c) are the same or not. I doubt it would be harmful to just go ahead and put it in your .ini file.


---------------------------

And Sitecharts, you really should have a static swapfile, not a dynamic one.



[This message has been edited by OuTpaTienT (edited 05-01-2001).]

[araaraara]

Are you using cacheman or another disk cache managing utility? Windows is probably using most of your new ram for the disk cache.
If you want to see how much windows is REALLY using the swapfile, Start/Run sysmon. Add the "Swapfile in use" moniter and "nused physical memory".

[Undeadlord]

Great topic guys,

I have been a Windows user and am currently a network administrator for an NT network and I didn't even know that much about my swap file and how to manage it. Thanks alot.

Undeadlord

[jkittlesen]

I just applied the Startup.ini hack on my system(Me,128 ram)will I be ok doing this?

[Jonty]

araaraara - How can I tell if I AM using cacheman? I don't think I am anyway.

I'm running the system monitor and it reports that the unused memory is just 11.7mb with the swap file at 106mb - so the new memory IS being used, thats what I wanted to know. Thanks for that tip.

There was an interesting post the other week in one of the forums about swapfiles and also a link to a website. I will see if I can find it.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Jonty]

Couldn't find the post but I found the website:
http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/Swapfile_Optimization/Swapfile_Optimization_01.htm

[challenger]

Thought I would post on this topic as well since I'm haveing memory problems. According to my system moniter I have 31.1mg physical memory free with a 261mg swap file! I've noticed lately that I can't open many applications at once. I've added more memory within the last few weeks and there was no change. Here's my system.

Abit KA7-100
Athlon Classic 750
Win98
40gig western digital
256mg RAM PC133

Challenger

[Jonty]

What I would like to know too is what exactly is using all this memory?

Thats a huge swap file you have there Challenger. What sort of applications do you have running? The applications I have running at the moment are the same ones as in my first post on this subject. Surely they don't take this much room up? What is eating this memory up?

[challenger]

That's what I would like to know too. All I'm running is Internet Explorer. I've had this problem every since I've installed my new mobo and processor.

edit: and I'm running Norton System Doctor

Challenger

[This message has been edited by challenger (edited 05-01-2001).]

[helldiverCDN]

The vcache ( disk cache ) is grabing most of your RAM.

See this link for the above mentioned site, for discussion about this subject.
http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/Disk_Cache_Optimization/Disk_Cache_Optimization_01.htm

Cheers,

hell out

[challenger]

Thanks for the link helldiver that fixed it. My swap file is still 260mb though. Should I do something about that?

Thanks
Challenger

[araaraara]

Jonty- Cacheman is a program with an for changing the settings the link you posted talks about. It also lets you change a few other settings to. It has some builtin settings you can choose than set the values for you.

[helldiverCDN]

Your 260MB swap is probably OK. I would leave it for now, see how things run.
If you run into any problems, you can always increase it.

Cheers,

hell out

[Nanea]

A little note about swap file in 95/98/ME:
This is for optimizing the performance of
Photoshop users.
Set your swap file to a dedicated partition
on your hard drive and 5 times the amount of
your RAM. Use this partition only for swap
file and nothing else. similar to Linux.
Then make sure that your scratch disk drive
setting in Photoshop does not use the swap
file partition. Also create another partition
for Photoshop scratchdisk, and again 5 times
the amount of your RAM. You can test how long it takes to do a filter in Photoshop
to check the performance gain. You should
have about 20 to 50 per cent faster, depending on the speed of your hard drive and CPU. I use a 9 GB U2W SCSI for my Swapfile and Scratchdisk.
For those NT/2000/xp users, Create additional
partitions to increas your pagefiles/swapfile. Each partition is only
allowed a maximum number of swap file depending on the amount of RAM. The more partition you have the more swap file you
have.