[1stPickPCHelp] Re: Virtual Memory
- From: "Ron Allen" <chizotz@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: 1stpickpchelp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 03:09:04 -0600
>I'm low on RAM. Would like to try Virtual memory. But if I am
>not satisfied with the way my Win98SE OS runs using Virtual
>memory, can I get rid of the Virual memory and restore the
>system to the old condition ?
> Have 32MB of RAM now, would like to get it up to 96MB using
>Virtual memory. Is that possible ?
Hello Victor,
You're already using virtual memory; you almost can't run Windows 9x without
using virtual memory.
It sounds like maybe there is a misconception about what virtual memory is.
Virtual memory is an area on your hard drive that Windows uses to store data
for programs you have running that there is no room for in physical RAM.
Virtual memory is also often called the "swap file". No program or data can be
worked on by the computer except for when it is loaded into physical RAM. When
you open more programs or files that can fit in your available RAM, Windows
compensates by saving the data it sees as not being needed in the immediate
future out to a special file on the hard drive. That frees up an amount of
physical RAM that can be used to process the programs and data that are
currently being handled. Then Windows might decide to store that data out to
disk to free up space in physical RAM to bring another set of data in from
virtual memory so it can be worked on. That's why it's often called the swap
file, because of all the swapping in and out going on.
Windows always defaults to having virtual memory turned on, and allocates an
amount of your hard drive space for the special file it uses for this. The file
Windows allocates could be several hundred megabytes.
So it doesn't really work the way you describe. Virtual memory is not added to
the system in the same way physical RAM is, because they are two very different
things. You can manually override Windows settings to force the amount of
virtual memory in your system to a given value, but that value may not be
optimal. You can set it too small and cause even more swapping to occur because
there isn't enough room in the swap file to hold everything Windows needs to
store there, or you can set it too high and waste hard drive space that Windows
will never make use of. Either way, the effect is not going to be the same as
if you added additional physical RAM to your machine.
I hope that explains the situation somewhat.
Ron
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