windos guru's a question

[MrBill]

My MB will accept 1.5 gig of ram.  I use win98se to play games and little else.  Would creating a ram drive on startup, say a half gig, and using that as win98,s swap space enhance performance enough to make it worthwhile?

TIA

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OhNooo
smile awhile

[MrSiD]

If you have lots of ram your os won't need to swap at all. If you want to make use of a high amount of ram, upgrade to W2k, AMD axia and DDR memory.

[Seeker]

Be carefull, adding to much can actually slow your system down as Windows can't address it all. I believe the limit is some where near 500 MB's but I'm not sure. You'd be well advised to trawl through some specialist hard ware NG's before messing with stuff such as ramdrives.

[Lephturn]

For Win98 anything over 512 may not do good things, upgrade to Win2k.  It can handle more than your workstation mainboard can.  Those kinds of limitations were a problem in the Win 9x code stream, but Win 2k Pro can handle up to 4 GB of ram.

Your swap file is important too, if you make it too big, it can actually slow you down.  I never go over 500 megs for a swap file on a workstation, and I always set the min and max to be the same.  For most applications, between 250 and 400 megs is fine.  My workstation uses a swap of 300 and I've got 256 megs of RAM in this thing.

If you have 1.5 Gig of Ram though, a Ram drive for the swap may be a good deal.  Heck, I'd make a 1 Gig Ram drive with that and leave my machine running Win2k all the time.  Then I'd use 1/2 that Ram drive for swap space, and the other half I'd install Aces High onto.  It would load damn fast that's for sure.  

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Sean "Lephturn" Conrad - Aces High Chief Trainer

A proud member of the mighty Flying Pigs http://www.flyingpigs.com

Check out Lephturn's Aerodrome for AH articles and training info!


[This message has been edited by Lephturn (edited 05-15-2001).]

[MrBill]

 Thanks all.  It appears that the short answer is yes
Unfortunately I have spent many years trying my best to ignore windos, except as a game system, and am therefor a novice when it comes to getting it to do what I would like it to do
I use OS/2 for most of my serious work on this machine.
I also boot linux, where I am putzing with  Apache server software for a large database app. for some associates.
I have win2K pro loaded (boots machine as a server) to mess with in my spare time but so far have not been able to get my Satik USB stick to work well under it.
98SE is in a small partition that I run a couple of games under, AH being one, The Satik runs well, but I do not get the overall performance I see others talk about, and this is what I am attempting to address.
Machine specs
(Bios are optimized for OS/2 and I know of no way to have them set differently when booting different os'es. other than manual resetting on each boot???)
1ghz tbird
200MHz FSB
32 meg ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon agpx2 (I can't get it stable at x4???)
on board sound (I dont use sound except for games that require it)
10/100 Ether net
Primary 1 40 gig maxtor UMDA 100 7200rpm
slave 1 generic 52x cd
primary 2 75 gig IBM deskstar UMDA 100 7200rpm
slave 2 pioneer dvd
ps2 mouse and keyboard
external modem (Rockwell chipset) on serial 2
plotter on parallel
2 printers on USB 1 (actually a laser printer and a combo ink jet, scanner, copier)
joystick on USB 2
Believe it or not no shared IRQ except steering and non concurrent systems.
The ram is cas2 pc133 and is needed by Photo Graphics Pro under OS/2 to get enough rendering speed when editing.

It rather amazes me that my old machine (AMD 300 OC'ed to 452 with 512 meg of ram & 16 meg matrox card) gave me better AH performance

If anyone has any Ideas I would be more than happy to give them a try.

Thanx again

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OhNooo
smile awhile