AMD RAMDISK and firefox/IE cache and Environment Variables speed up

[PWRwindows]

I use the AMD RAMDISK. I made it 256Mb in size. I put my firefox cache and IE cache there. I also changed my systems ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES in TEMP and TMP to that drive. I put my windows 7 pagefile to that drive at only 16MB size.

My machine runs so much better now.

8GB RAM and only used 256MB for the ram drive and all firefox cache and IE cache and system temp stuff is used in ram now and it's amazing how nice it is compared to all that R/W to my drives.


EDIT: I forgot to mention ( and assume most of you are windows power users) that if you intend to download a huge installation file then install it. You will want to change the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES to one of your hard drives first. Then download the huge file and install. Once that is complete change EV back to your ramdrive. Works like a charm.

 

[PWRwindows]

I know some will ask why only a 16Mb pagefile. Because with only 8GB ram I have never even got close to using that. I ran my machine with no pagefile for a very long time with no problems then I started converting videos to HD and that program started crashing and after reading through logs I found that it NEEDED a PAGEFILE. It didn't need a large one. So I researched and found that some older programs actually require a pagefile to work properly.

Even if your pagefile is only 16Mb that is usually sufficient for these older programs that require it. All of your other programs will load to RAM fine without it.

Just want to add I am an avid gamer and play Battlefield 2,BC2,3 and Planetside and even with those games running and firefox open and winamp (I know winamp oldschool, lol) I have never got close to 8GB of ram usage.

So it's nice to not have my windows trashing my HD's with that pagefile and now it just does it in ram with the very small ramdrive.

 

[Callender]

Ramdisk question

Well I also use a RAMdisk and moved system temp and environment temp variables onto it and yes everything is much faster to open - especially huge files!

I have a question though. Personally I found that a 16Mb page file is okay for Windows Partition but the page file is swapped to another drive on my machine. That seems to work for me. Like you say RAM usage never gets anywhere near maximum - it's rarely more than 2.2 GB.

My question is this. Did you disable Superfetch?

I'm just asking because the real performance gains only happened after disabling Superfetch on my machine as it would seem that a RAMdisk does essentially the same job only a lot faster.

Note: I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea to disable Superfetch!

 

[PWRwindows]

Yes I disabled Superfetch and prefetch. It doesn't bother me having a program or browser open 2 seconds longer. I did this because I am a gamer and don't want those programs writing to the HHD all the time. It is well known to cause lag spikes in online games because superfetch will even write information about the GAME FILES your game client is accessing often so it can open them faster with superfetch (might open a game file half a second faster, lol) but it really degrades online gaming because it does it even when the game is running and accessing one file often.

I usually put my environment paths back to my secondary drive when I'm not browsing the internet also. But put it to the RAMdrive always when browsing, watching videos online or watching live streaming so that firefox is forced to use my ramdrive for cache. Sometimes firefox will ignore the disable offline cache / browser.cache.memory.enable and use your enviroment paths instead.

That's what I do anyway and it really makes my online gaming smoother and my browsing smoother. Hope this answers your question.

You can disable prefetch and superfetch with this simple .reg information. Just save it to notepad .txt file then change .txt to .reg and double click it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000000
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000000

To reenable them just use this code. It changes the dword:00000000 back to 00000003.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000003
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003

good luck.