Using my extra RAM for other things in an old, updated 32-bit XPPro. SP3.

Ant wrote:
On 1/15/2011 3:19 PM PT, Patok typed:

A couple days ago, I upgraded my old 32-bit Windows XP Pro. SP3 (IE6)
system/computer/system to an Intel i7 with 6 GB of RAM. I know that
32-bit operating systems/OS' cannot see all that RAM due to old
software designs' limitations. Currently, my working Windows only sees
about 2.5 GB of physical RAM (shouldn't it be 3 GB though?).

I heard that I can use the unused memory for other things like a RAM
drive for swap files, %temp%, etc. How do I do that?

And yes, I will get 64-bit W7 or another OS one day. At this time, I
am not going to do that since XP Pro. SP3 does fine for what I need.

Thank you in advance.


I quite accidentally came across the Ramdisk product:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...tware/ramdisk?
which does exactly what you want, as long as your motherboard has
Physical
Address Extensions enabled. If it does, you can have a nice 2GB ramdisk
for free.
I didn't read this thread carefully, so I don't know if this product was
mentioned, or not. Sorry if it was.

Oooh, I think that's the program I heard about. Free for 4 GB and less.
Sweet.

I'm testing it now, and I can't believe what it's doing :-)
I never thought I'd see WinXP SP3 x32, access memory above
4GB. But that's what they've managed to do, and claim to be
doing it via PAE. Pretty amazing. I'm using mine as a
Page File, as a test :-)

It also passed my HDTune test case. The last time I evaluated
the program, it crashed in the first 30 seconds, as the first
thing I tried on it was HDTune benchmark. The following is
collected while the software is using 2GB above the 4GB mark
with WinXP x32. So now it passes my test case. You'll notice,
there is a slight difference in performance, between the
first 1GB and second 1GB of the Ramdisk.

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/8...am2gbabove.gif

I installed 6GB RAM, and in theory, WinXP x32 can't see the RAM
above the 4GB mark. But that Ramdisk is now running on the 2GB
above the 4GB mark. I figured for sure, it would crash
or error out, or not allow it.

Paul

On 1/16/2011 11:35 AM PT, Paul typed:

I quite accidentally came across the Ramdisk product:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...tware/ramdisk?
which does exactly what you want, as long as your motherboard has
Physical
Address Extensions enabled. If it does, you can have a nice 2GB ramdisk
for free.
I didn't read this thread carefully, so I don't know if this product was
mentioned, or not. Sorry if it was.

Oooh, I think that's the program I heard about. Free for 4 GB and
less. Sweet.

I'm testing it now, and I can't believe what it's doing :-)
I never thought I'd see WinXP SP3 x32, access memory above
4GB. But that's what they've managed to do, and claim to be
doing it via PAE. Pretty amazing. I'm using mine as a
Page File, as a test :-)

It also passed my HDTune test case. The last time I evaluated
the program, it crashed in the first 30 seconds, as the first
thing I tried on it was HDTune benchmark. The following is
collected while the software is using 2GB above the 4GB mark
with WinXP x32. So now it passes my test case. You'll notice,
there is a slight difference in performance, between the
first 1GB and second 1GB of the Ramdisk.

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/8...am2gbabove.gif

I installed 6GB RAM, and in theory, WinXP x32 can't see the RAM
above the 4GB mark. But that Ramdisk is now running on the 2GB
above the 4GB mark. I figured for sure, it would crash
or error out, or not allow it.

Nice. I haven't tried it yet. I am not sure when. Way too busy now.
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Paul wrote:
Ant wrote:
On 1/15/2011 3:19 PM PT, Patok typed:

I quite accidentally came across the Ramdisk product:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...tware/ramdisk? which
does exactly what you want, as long as your motherboard has Physical
Address Extensions enabled. If it does, you can have a nice 2GB ramdisk
for free. I didn't read this thread carefully, so I don't know if this
product was mentioned, or not. Sorry if it was.

Oooh, I think that's the program I heard about. Free for 4 GB and less.
Sweet.

I'm testing it now, and I can't believe what it's doing :-) I never thought
I'd see WinXP SP3 x32, access memory above 4GB. But that's what they've
managed to do, and claim to be doing it via PAE. Pretty amazing. I'm using
mine as a Page File, as a test :-)

This is actually the most sensible usage for the Ramdisk in XP32, come to
think of it. That way, you effectively use the entire memory for... memory! Heh.
Please report back if there are any problems with such usage. From the
description of how Ramdisk works (in the PDF manual), it should be fine, but who
knows.

--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
--
Whoever bans a book, shall be banished. Whoever burns a book, shall burn.

On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:35:27 -0500, Patok
wrote:

Paul wrote:
I'm using
mine as a Page File, as a test :-)

This is actually the most sensible usage for the Ramdisk in XP32, come to
think of it. That way, you effectively use the entire memory for... memory! Heh.
Please report back if there are any problems with such usage. From the
description of how Ramdisk works (in the PDF manual), it should be fine, but who
knows.


Actually, it makes no sense to use a RAM disk as a page file. Using
RAM as a page file takes RAM away from Windows use. Windows having
less RAM means that it will use the page file more. So you take the
RAM away from RAM with one hand and give it back with the other. It's
like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. You achieve nothing, but you
incur the extra overhead of the RAM disk.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003
Please Reply to the Newsgroup

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:35:27 -0500, Patok
wrote:

Paul wrote:
I'm using
mine as a Page File, as a test :-)
This is actually the most sensible usage for the Ramdisk in XP32, come to
think of it. That way, you effectively use the entire memory for... memory! Heh.
Please report back if there are any problems with such usage. From the
description of how Ramdisk works (in the PDF manual), it should be fine, but who
knows.

Actually, it makes no sense to use a RAM disk as a page file. Using
RAM as a page file takes RAM away from Windows use. Windows having
less RAM means that it will use the page file more. So you take the
RAM away from RAM with one hand and give it back with the other. It's
like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. You achieve nothing, but you
incur the extra overhead of the RAM disk.

Actually, you didn't read carefully enough. We're talking about using the
memory above 4GB for a ram disk, on a XP32 system that can't normally access
memory above 4GB. That way, we effectively increase the XP memory to whatever
memory the machine actually has.
You would have a point for XP64, or for a machine with less than 4GB total
memory, but we're not talking about that.

--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
--
Whoever bans a book, shall be banished. Whoever burns a book, shall burn.

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:35:27 -0500, Patok
wrote:

Paul wrote:
I'm using
mine as a Page File, as a test :-)
This is actually the most sensible usage for the Ramdisk in XP32, come to
think of it. That way, you effectively use the entire memory for... memory! Heh.
Please report back if there are any problems with such usage. From the
description of how Ramdisk works (in the PDF manual), it should be fine, but who
knows.


Actually, it makes no sense to use a RAM disk as a page file. Using
RAM as a page file takes RAM away from Windows use. Windows having
less RAM means that it will use the page file more. So you take the
RAM away from RAM with one hand and give it back with the other. It's
like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. You achieve nothing, but you
incur the extra overhead of the RAM disk.


Ken, if I'd loaded the ramdisk, with memory from below 4GB, it
would be dumb. But this is memory, which according to accepted
rules, can't be accessed. The developer of that program,
figured out how to do it (somehow). So to take advantage of 2GB of
RAM which normally would not be functional at all in WinXP,
using that Ramdisk program makes more of the 6GB usable (one way or another).
It means the 2GB in no-mans-land, is now adding to the page file.

This is a guess as to how my system is set up. There is 6GB of
RAM installed, and the Memory Remap feature in the BIOS, lifts
the fourth gigabyte of RAM, above the 4GB mark. That splits the
RAM into two 3GB chunks, with a 1GB space for hardware in between.
Total address range is 7GB, 6GB for RAM, 1GB for hardware.

X \
X \__ Ramdisk using memory up here. 2GB of 3GB available up here, is usable.
X /
X I/O space for video and system busses
X \
X \___ WinXP SP3 x32, normally reports "3071MB free"
X / This is the conventional memory

For some reason, the Ramdisk program thinks that only 2GB is available
above the 4GB mark, so I have to go back into the BIOS in a moment
and verify again that I have remapping turned on.

I plan to run my other benchmark case, which is to try to run 16
copies of SuperPI 1.5 running 32M, and see whether WinXP continues
to crash out the programs or not. I was having problems with
that in some testing a couple days ago. Now that I have a
decent pagefile, I'll have a chance to re-test. Win2K was passing
my test case, and WinXP was failing, and now that I have a better
page file, it'll be interesting to see if that helps or not.

*******

Oh, another thing. My first dumb move with the new setup, was
to select "hibernate" when I shut down a few hours ago, to go out
for some exercise. When I came back, the system fell on its face
because the new pagefile was gone :-) It came back up on the second
try.

Paul