Free RAM

LMiller7 said:

The Pagefile only kicks in when the RAM is running low. Which is never in my case.

Wrong. No operating system in living memory has ever worked that way.

The pagefile is not simply some kind of overflow area used only when RAM is short. It is used as a place to offload rarely used data leaving more of your fast memory for more important purposes. It will generally improve performance.

A RAMDisk was once a useful thing, back in the dark ages of DOS. But those days are long gone. Modern operating systems have a sophisticated system cache that provides most of the advantages of a RAMDisk with fewer problems. The OS can usually make better use of RAM than a RAMDisk.

Oh, im slightly confused as if i have plenty of free RAM, why would the pagefile kick in? Does windows set a limit of some kind that it wants to be 'active' if you like at a time?

If you had even more RAM installed say 16GB, wouldn't disabling it help things? Its 1 less thing for the HDD to do..

That link was quite useful. I already had a basic understanding of it, turns out its a little more advanced of what i previously thought.

But still i would like to know why windows would NOT benefit from just having more RAM and not using the pagefile at all.

Thats pretty much what i read from your link.

I was thinking if the Pagefile did not exist, and Windows never page'd any running files as there would ALWAYS be enough RAM available lets say, wouldn't that work better?

For Windows to never have to worry about how much resources its running at one time.

Superfetch does an amazing job at the end of the day though.

whs said:

You never said for what functions you want to increase the performance.

Most operations are bottlenecked by the disk, that's where a SSD is a great help. Internet operations are obviously dependent on your internet speed - no RAM or SSD will help here. Number crunching like when you do video encoding depends on the muscle of the CPU and for games you depend on the GPU performance.

So if you were a bit more specific about your performance wishes, maybe we can find a solution (which may cost money).

Just in general performance for application loading times, im not requiring all this performance im just enquiring what is possible with extra RAM involved really.

I couldnt settle for anything less than a Cherryville

Thats if i do consider a SSD :)