Virtual Memory Partition

-zero- · #1 11-18-2007, 08:00 PM

I spent today reformatting my hard drive and re-installing windows following Flash8pro's old guide. I made a 2GB partitoin for virtual memory like he suggested and set it up, but now I keep getting that little popup in my system tray telling me that the drive is running out of memory. Anyone know how I can fix this? I noticed that when I was setting windows to use this partition instead of my c: it recommended 4GB. Should I re-do the format with this number? Thanks for any help.

plool · #2 11-18-2007, 08:51 PM

You can disable the low space warning by following this guide:

Disable Low Disk Space Warning

I actually don't see a hudge benefit of having a separate swap partition, but to each his own.

nuclear500 · #3 11-18-2007, 09:12 PM

Creating separate partitions on the same physical disk does nothing for performance or stability or data integrity. It is only done if you actually want to make a distinction between presentation of areas of storage.

My honest recommendation is to start over completely and don't even worry about separate partitions. Just be aware that everything important to you you keep in My Documents.

But if thats not really an option - go ahead and drop the page file size to 1.5GB on the "VMEM" 2GB partition and create another page file on the C: drive equal to the size of the RAM in your system.

Meech · #4 11-18-2007, 09:28 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Creating separate partitions on the same physical disk does nothing for performance or stability or data integrity. It is only done if you actually want to make a distinction between presentation of areas of storage.

My honest recommendation is to start over completely and don't even worry about separate partitions. Just be aware that everything important to you you keep in My Documents.

[/ QUOTE ]

Seconded.

-zero- · #5 11-18-2007, 09:40 PM

Ugh, doing this all again is going to take several hours. I'll just change the size. Thanks.

Also, I have 3GB of RAM. Should the separate partition have been 3GB in the first place?

plool · #6 11-18-2007, 09:53 PM

If you have 3GB of RAM you are hardly ever going to use the swap file. Some people even recommend disabling the swap file completely when you have that much RAM.

2-3GB swap file is huge. It doesn't really matter and whatever you set it to is not a big deal.

nuclear500 · #7 11-18-2007, 09:53 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Also, I have 3GB of RAM. Should the separate partition have been 3GB in the first place?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes.

cbloom · #8 11-19-2007, 01:51 PM

No swap file FTW !!

nuclear500 · #9 11-19-2007, 01:59 PM

[ QUOTE ]
No swap file FTW !!

[/ QUOTE ]

If you can prove that Windows never actually uses more physical memory then you have, this can actually be beneficial to speeding the system up. Windows doesn't HAVE to page, it does it most of the time just because its there. It figures it can page out of an infrequently accessed, well, page of memory and put it to disk to free up physical for something more active. But if theres no need to free up physical, whats the point?

I operated for awhile without a page file years ago, but then a nagging blue screen of death caused the need to get a memory dump file analyzed and you can't do that without a pagefile.

ispiked · #10 11-19-2007, 08:05 PM

nuclear500,

Were you sharing the BDOD issue as an anecdote or as reasoning for using virtual memory? If it's the latter case, I'd say that reasoning isn't valid since the performance gain you're going to get would seem to greatly outweigh the inconvenience of getting a memory dump when you BSOD'd.