Page file and misc other "newbie" questions...

hey, this is my first post and im not that knowledged with the PC so please bare with me...

first, i heard soemthign abotu pagefile while gaming yesterday... when i asked what it was, they told me to look it up on google... well i got a few reliable results, but i felt as if they assumed that it was a professional that was reaidng it not a newbie like me. anyway, here goes my first question, how do u modify your page file (please througly explain it).

Also, i only have 256 DDR ram (pc2700)... im thinking of getting another stick (256 or 512) do you have any advice, or comments that can help me out? (btw my current ram stick is made by ' elixer ' )

ok before i go, are there any tweaks and other free mods i can do to make my computer run signifcantly better? thank you

[Uranium-235]

What operating sytem are you running?

sorry, windows xp professional

[Grinnin Reaper]

Yhea, the setting is diffrent for diffrent versions of windows. First thing is to right click on my computer go to properties. On 98 Go to performance and virtual memory. It can be adjusted here. XP is similar but the call it page file. What it is, is a way of fooling the system into thinking you have more ram than your really do. And for a system to run stable and some games to run at all it has to be enabled (is enabled by default so don't worry it is there already unless someone has modified it). Your computer uses it as an extinsion of RAM to stash things it will need soon, but maybe not at this moment. More is better to a point but it does take up space on your harddrive, I normally use 1 times my ram for the min. and 1.5 times my ram for the max. Works good for me. Also amount of ram you should have, I always base off of speed of your processor. a 200 mhz machine doesn't need 512 mb of ram, and 3 Ghz would choke on 32 mb of ram. I usually use about 512 for 1 to 2 Ghz processors. Just a ballpark. Also speed of the RAM can mean more that how much. If you can run 333mhz ram on your computer (you'll have to check the specs of your motherboard to be sure) it will run better that 133 ram. Also you may here the term cas latency. It basically means how long it takes your ram to respond to a request. Lower is better. But if you have multiple sticks all the setting need to be the same. A lot of info, so if you have any questions please ask away.

[Grinnin Reaper]

Oh and for Xp:

Right Click my computer
go to proporties
go to advanced
in performance click on settings
go to the advanced tab
at the bottom it will say virtual memory and tell you the amount you have set
Just click on change to change the settings.

where cani get pc2700 ddr 512 RAM? liek a specific link

[Grinnin Reaper]

I Like www.crucial.com good prices and lifetime guarantee depending on what ya get.

hmm, i set my pagefile, and i dont really see any difference... yes, i restarted my comp... is there anythign else im missing? i followed your "windows xp" directions... :shake:

[Omega]

If you're gaming, you really don't want to use your pagefile. The pagefile is tremendously slower than RAM (which is tremendously slower than L2 cache, which is slower than L1 cache). For an idea of access times, and general sizes, here's some comparison:

Registers 1-3 ns 1 KB
Level 1 Cache (on-chip) 2-8 ns 8 KB-128 KB
Level 2 Cache (off-chip) 5-12 ns 0.5 MB - 8 MB
Main Memory (RAM) 10-60 ns 64 MB - 1 GB
Hard Disk 3,000,000 - 10,000,000 ns 20 - 100 GB

You can't really control any of these factors except the main memory and hard disk (the two slowest components). Data is stored in the pagefile, which resides on the hard disk, when there's no room left in the RAM. The things that are stored in memory is anything the processor is going to need to access soon. This includes program instruction sets, and files necessary to show you what you want. When you're gaming, the computer has to store the game engine, the maps, the models, textures, sounds, and who knows what else in memory. Some of this will be stored in video memory (on the video card), but the rest needs to be stored somehwere, somewhere from the registers to the hard disk. Ideally everything necessary could be stored in the registers, or L1 cache, but it simply can't, so it has to get pushed back to slower memory types. If you can get all the necessary information loaded into RAM, you really should be fine for gaming. However, if you don't have enough RAM, and data has to be pushed back onto the pagefile, you'll experience game slowdown, when it has to load new textures, or perform certain actions.

Translation: you want as much data to be stored in RAM as possible. This day in age, I would recommend 512 MB of RAM. It's relatively cheap, and can boost system performance when you want to have lots of programs running siumultaneously (lots of IE windows, Photoshop, Outlook, and VirtualDub), and will keep your games running smoothly (in that aspect, at least).