RAM and virtual memory

How much RAM do you need to ensure that you wont need the virtual memory?

 

Hmmm, yeah, I am wondering the same as well.

JC

 

depends what you are doing... if you have 2gb' that should be enought for everthing and anything right now... definatly no more though

i am still using 512mb...

 

Yea I agree. If you are a gamer or an video editor then you would want more ram. I would say 1gb is probably the same zone right now. If you are also planning to get Vista, then 512 is minimum so its better to get more.

 

You need as much RAM as the largest amount of memory you ever use. You can try checking the Peak Commit Charge in task manger (on the performance tab). That's a rough figure of the largest amount of memory you've used since you last rebooted. That's to *not use the pagefile at all*

You can get away with less, and have the pagefile be used occasionally, with pretty much no performance loss. (Because some data is used very rarely, so there's no harm in it being pushed to the pagefile)

 

yuio - it would be hard to add more than 2Gb to most laptops.

Jalf - Peak Commit Charge (I think) is a measure of the largest amount of memory requested - not necessarily used.

Also, see the site below and the quote I took from it below. Basically they recommend clearing out the page file, setting it to a low initial value, and then what it increases to is how much memory you would need to add to avoid using it.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

But have a high Maximum size — 700 or 800 MB or even more if there is plenty of disk space. Having this high will do no harm. Then if you find the actual pagefile.sys gets larger (as seen in Explorer), adjust the initial size up accordingly. Such a need for more than a minimal initial page file is the best indicator of benefit from adding RAM: if an initial size set, for a trial, at 50MB never grows, then more RAM will do nothing for the machine's performance.

 

1gb is a must and 2gb is nice to have

 

I don't know why you want to completely eliminate the page file. I don't remeber all the reasons, but isn't a good idea to try to completely get rid of it. Add more RAM, and if you are really concenred, minimize the size of the page file.

 

you wont notice anything by getting rid of the page file. personaly i think it runs worse. and 2 gigs is so cheap these days so just upgrade to that.

 

If pagefiles are not accessed, then the hard drive wont "click" as much either. This is actually good for the hard drive when everything is registered to the ram instead. Might help it use less power.

note: applications will request more space than they actually will use to ensure enough ram is reserved. I guess this is why the peak commit charge is higher than what applications actually use.

 

No, the idea is NOT to get rid of the page file, or even to minimize the size of it permanently. The idea is to add enough RAM that the system uses RAM memory (faster, no moving parts) rather than virtual (HD) memory. You still want probably at least a 100M page file, but you don't want to use it, ideally.

 

I'm running w/o paging file on 1GB, WinXP. Only once in 5 months, it couldn't start an app due to lack of memory. And I'm not taking any special steps to avoid use of memory (except the usual shutting down of -for me- pointless services like IP security themes etc.).

Then again, I'm no graphic designer. One should try running w/o a pagefile for a week, see if one gets out of memory messages, if not run for a month, if not after a month, run forever (or until OS switch)

Seems to me if you let Win manage the pagefile size, it will increase it beyond reasonable necessity. Sometimes it increased to a factor of two of what I found was necessary for the OS to run smoothly.