Vista flys with manual virtual memory settings

[nonchalant]

Ok, Ive not posted on this before due to possible flames but also because I wasnt sure if it worked. However time has proven my thesis to be correct. If this doesnt work for you tho dont blame me.

Recently I had reason to play with virtual memory settings on a customers PC which led me to playing around with my settings. Now let me say firstly that Ive never had any luck with manually setting vm under WinXP. I tried setting vm under Vista before and got 'out of memory' errors but with different settings.

I run Vista Premium 64-bit with 4gb of RAM and a Quad6600. I have a Striker mobo set up with 2 WD raptors in RAID0.

Anyway what I did was follow MS instructions and set my vm to 4GB min and 12Gb max. And it flys. It really does. Its like XP. Ever since I replaced WinXP with Vista one thing thats bugged me is its not quite as fast as XP in a number of ways. But this setting makes Vista run like XP but with all the goodies! Try it out. Im still waiting for an out of memory error but after hours and hours of playing COH and normal use Ive not had one hiccup. And COH runs faster. You almost never see the Windows 'hourglass'.

Atm Im just web browsing but I have 62% of my RAM FREE. Ive never noticed that much free ram under Vista before. And as Vista uses 'prefetch' this shouldnt be an issue anyway but having this much RAM free with prefetch enabled obviously is a good thing.

So, it would be interesting to find out how people go with this cos I can hardly find any info on this test on the net. Perhaps post your results here?

 

[gunslinger]

Really? As fast as XP huh? To here some tell it Vista has always been faster than Xp....lol. We both know better. I'll install Vista 32 bit on my test rig and try it out. If it does what you say and brings back the responsiveness of Windows XP it would be great.

 

[iladelf]

So, in effect, you should set the VM min to the size of your RAM, and the max to 3 times the size? My guess is that you should have at least 2GB RAM in your machine to accomplish this, no?

 

[thecoldone06]

i did as you said and manually set my VM. It didn't seem to do much good for me. I have Vista Business with 2 GB of memory. Some things seem to come up just fine but others (explorer) take a horrendous amount of time to come up if it comes up at all.

 

[gunslinger]

Made the changes and can see no change. I'm running Vista ultimate 32 bit on my test system. "My computer" takes a while to come up, and control panel takes about 1-2 mins. I'm running 2 gigs of RAM also.

 

[nonchalant]

Hmm well that sounds a bit disappointing. Maybe you need 64-bit and 4GB of RAM for this to work? And when I refer to 'fast' I mean the time it takes to open windows and switch between tasks. My computer for example opens in about 1.5 secs (same as XP).

EDIT: I also have the SP1 public beta installed.

 

[thecoldone06]

Hmm well that sounds a bit disappointing. Maybe you need 64-bit and 4GB of RAM for this to work? And when I refer to 'fast' I mean the time it takes to open windows and switch between tasks. My computer for example opens in about 1.5 secs (same as XP).

EDIT: I also have the SP1 public beta installed.

SP1 beta might also help a lot. There are a lot of things I'm waiting on SP1 for. Thats what gives me hope for this seemingly hopeless OS.

 

[gunslinger]

Maybe the SP1 is the difference maker here. Vista still seems like the slug its always been no matter what I do to it. I have tried adjusting the vm settings, dissableing serviceses, removing unneeded programs,adding up to 4 gigs of RAM ect. and I have not come close to the speed of XP. Its also not consistant, at times feeling quick, then freezing.

 

[nonchalant]

Maybe the SP1 is the difference maker here. Vista still seems like the slug its always been no matter what I do to it. I have tried adjusting the vm settings, dissableing serviceses, removing unneeded programs,adding up to 4 gigs of RAM ect. and I have not come close to the speed of XP. Its also not consistant, at times feeling quick, then freezing.

Are you running 64-bit? If not then maybe thats the key? IMO 64-bit utilises all 4GB of RAM. If this isnt the key then im not sure what is. All Ive done is manually set my vm. Its still honking along..

 

[gunslinger]

The versions I have used are home premium 32 bit, Ultimate 32 bit, and ultimate 64 bit.

 

[nonchalant]

The versions I have used are home premium 32 bit, Ultimate 32 bit, and ultimate 64 bit.

How much free RAM do you generally have with manual vm settings using 4GB under the 64-bit version? (with say just IE, your AV and a few other things open in the tray?). Reason I ask is because this was something I noticed increased markedly after I manually set my vm and is what (I assume) accounts for the increase in speed.

 

[jazz]

Hmm, instead of setting Pagefile, disable it completely and reboot.

Ram will be much much faster than hdd access, no matter how quick your hdd is.

this way, all the prefetching takes place in the ram and is not cached onto the hdd. You'll need decent amounts of RAM though. I got 4gb RAM on Vista 64bit

Jazz

 

[nonchalant]

Ok I tried no paging file but it didnt seem any faster than manually setting my virtual memory and in fact benched and seemed a bit slower. First thing I noticed that came back was the old vista 'hourglass'..

My experience has always been with XP at least that no paging file settings usually eventually produce system or out of memory errors.

Gone back to my manual settings.

 

[gunslinger]

When I was using vista 32 bit and 4 gigs of RAM before installing anything, the OS was using over 700 mb of RAM all by itself.

 

[Blues]

Also I have read article on similarly related stuff and Vista is really not designed to run with out a pagefile thus when you do remove it it does run slower.

 

[nonchalant]

When I was using vista 32 bit and 4 gigs of RAM before installing anything, the OS was using over 700 mb of RAM all by itself.

Thats quite normal for Vista which manages memory very differently to XP (aka Superfetch). At the moment im just web browsing and my system is using 1600mb RAM with 59% free.

 

[gunslinger]

Oh yeah it manages memory a lot different than XP, It tries to use it all....lol.