possibly senseless upgrade, can I take advantage of it?

For one reason or another (read:ridiculous combo deal) I ended up with 12GB of RAM on my main computer. Is there any way to really take advantage of this for most daily computing tasks?

On a regular basis I doubt if you will use all that ram. If you are into games, multitasking and other high usage programs. It may be used ocassionally. I for one have 6gb and have never come near using all my RAM.

from a tweaking/optimizing standpoint is there anything I can change or enable to take advantage of nearly endless extra RAM which it seems I now have?

There's not much to change...

I have 4GB and rarely ever use more than 2. Right now I am using 0.8.

unless you screwed up superfetch, W7 natively takes advantage of all the RAM. I assume you have 64-bit. with 32-bit obvioulsy it won't use more than 3.2 GB.

I think if you use Revit MEP or os, 8 GB is recommended and 12 GB probably fine. but for everyday user,it won't matter. the HDD is more a bottleneck. an SSD really speeds things up. But with superfetch and 12 GB, it already should be OK.

for new PCs with quadcore (assuming you actually use it) 8 GB is recommended, so 12 GB is not such a waste of money if you got a good deal.

If you can, return 6GB. You will not make use of all 12GB on daily tasks, 6GB is plenty for Windows 7 64-Bit.

Else sell it on eBay or give it to someone that's close to you a good friend, girl friend or good relative.

HerrKaLeun said:

unless you screwed up superfetch, W7 natively takes advantage of all the RAM. I assume you have 64-bit. with 32-bit obvioulsy it won't use more than 3.2 GB.

I think if you use Revit MEP or os, 8 GB is recommended and 12 GB probably fine. but for everyday user,it won't matter. the HDD is more a bottleneck. an SSD really speeds things up. But with superfetch and 12 GB, it already should be OK.

for new PCs with quadcore (assuming you actually use it) 8 GB is recommended, so 12 GB is not such a waste of money if you got a good deal.

Click to expand...

I've never messed with superfetch or anything, so I'm not sure if I somehow messed it up or what. The computer is insanely fast now, but when I do splurge on an SSD I bet it will be amazing.

I've already separated the OS and programs from the rest of my data. I'm not really sure that made any difference whatsoever except from an organizing standpoint.

With that much RAM, you can run lots of virtual machines

Good idea!

Windows 7 as main, Ubuntu on the left, Fedora on the right and XP minimized...

12 GB of ram is overkill for most users however you will benefit from it everyday. your multitasking won't slow the computer nearly as much, and it'll generally be a more responsive machine. of course you probably have a bottle neck elsewhere in your system but if nothing else you've always got a few GB to spare for another PC.

Keep it. The time will come when you will be glad you have it. When it comes to ram and disk space, I relate to the people that grew up during the depression (my folks) who's idea was they would never go hungry again. Remembering the days of 64k of ram and 10 MEG (not gig) hard drives that cost upwards of $1000, on this computer build I have 8gb of ram and 3TB disk space, and am always looking for deals to expand.

Don't need it, but I don't care...I got it.

You could set up a RAM disk. The program will set up Windows in such a way that it sees part of your RAM as a harddisk drive. Whatever you can do with a normal HDD, you can do with a Ramdisk. One very useful application of ramdisk is placing the program files in them so programs will load insanely fast. There are a few drawback though. Alot of programs are buggy and cause the computer to crash. You've to upload all the file in TO the ram disk FROM the HDD at every startup and then you've to rewrite back all the fill TO the HDD FROM the ramdisk at every shutdown. It's extremely time-consuming.

I would suggest you to sell 6-8GB of the RAM you have and use that money to buy a 80GB Intel X25 SSD. Your processor and GC will probably be obsolete before you end up running a suit of programs that will actually make use of even 6GB of RAM in total.

fatedquest said:

You could set up a RAM disk. The program will set up Windows in such a way that it sees part of your RAM as a harddisk drive. Whatever you can do with a normal HDD, you can do with a Ramdisk. One very useful application of ramdisk is placing the program files in them so programs will load insanely fast. There are a few drawback though. Alot of programs are buggy and cause the computer to crash. You've to upload all the file in TO the ram disk FROM the HDD at every startup and then you've to rewrite back all the fill TO the HDD FROM the ramdisk at every shutdown. It's extremely time-consuming.

Click to expand...

Is Ramdisk even useful with W7? I mean, W7 uses all available RAM before it uses the HDD anyway. Why make that RAM smaller, artificially let it use the RAM disk then? that maybe was a good XP trick, but W7 uses RAM so well, no need to mess with it, you likely make matters worse. In addition, I don't know of free ramdisk software, most free one is limited to some 100 MB.

HerrKaLeun said:

fatedquest said:

You could set up a RAM disk. The program will set up Windows in such a way that it sees part of your RAM as a harddisk drive. Whatever you can do with a normal HDD, you can do with a Ramdisk. One very useful application of ramdisk is placing the program files in them so programs will load insanely fast. There are a few drawback though. Alot of programs are buggy and cause the computer to crash. You've to upload all the file in TO the ram disk FROM the HDD at every startup and then you've to rewrite back all the fill TO the HDD FROM the ramdisk at every shutdown. It's extremely time-consuming.

Click to expand...

Is Ramdisk even useful with W7? I mean, W7 uses all available RAM before it uses the HDD anyway. Why make that RAM smaller, artificially let it use the RAM disk then? that maybe was a good XP trick, but W7 uses RAM so well, no need to mess with it, you likely make matters worse. In addition, I don't know of free ramdisk software, most free one is limited to some 100 MB.

Click to expand...

If you're talking about Prefetch and Superfetch, Windows 7 hardly uses all the available RAM. That was actually what went wrong with Windows Vista. Vista's Prefetch and Superfetch worked too hard, constantly analyzing user activity, populating the prefetch folder and worse of all, filling up the RAM with too much files at startup. That resulted in running programs having very little available work space. Windows 7 prefetch and superfetch are much smarter and less agressive. You will hardly see anyone having a startup memory footprint of more than one GB. In fact, one of my PCs starts up with 380MB of RAM without quite alot of startup programs.

In theory, Windows 7 superfetch and prefetch is similar to using a RAM disk. So you're quite right to say that it's pretty redundant to use RAM disk. The only reason would probably have more control over what you really want to load into you RAM. For example, Adobe programs and coding programs still takes quite a while to load even with prefetch, because prefetch only loads selected files from many programs into memory. However, if someone hardly restarts his PC but has to work with multiple programs on a project, like web designing with heavy javascript or flash, you might appreciate RAM disk. Of course getting an SSD is anytime more practical. But someone here has 12 GB of RAM.

There are free RAM disk programs. I can't remember the name since it's been a while since I used it. But I did set up a 512MB ramdisk and I don't remember there being a limit on it.

RamDisk sounds like a good idea. Of course you can always re-sell or donate for good cause.