Tweaking your PC????

Hi guys, sorry to have been away for a while. I have and still am mega busy with a college course

I have also been busy building a new pc for myself which took some doing for a newbie Whilst going through some internet tuts and the like to help me in my quest I came across something that was very interesting and was aimed at improving daw performace and memory usage.

Basically (this is how I interpreted it, please correct me if Im wrong) it stated that memory was so expensive in the early 1990's, Micro$ came up with a system that would help out the shortfall of memory by creating the pagefile system . The pagefile runs in conjuntion with your ram by storing the overspill on the hdd and reading the info as and when it needed. It can also put that info back to the ram when other application demands are no longer running or needed.
The article also went on to say that this system was a very time consuming, processor hungry and out dated with todays electronics. It then goes on to suggest turning off the pagefiling system and letting the ram do all the work with the idea of it will be faster with less processes.

It also stated that only qualified or competant persons should try this with a system minimum of 2gb ram. I ADVISE YOU NOT TO TRY THIS AT ALL!!!!

I have a niggling feeling that this is a case of too good to be true, but I could be wrong!!!

I repeat "DO NOT TRY THIS ON YOUR SYSTEM"

I was just wondering if any techies on here knew anything about such practices or experiments??

Thanks for reading,

Barry

[James Oakwood]

This is my take on what I remember so pls correct me if wrong

The PC was originally designed to operate on a base memory of 640k. Yep less than 1Mbyte of RAM. It didn't envisage massive programs coming along like windows and PCs got by just fine using DOS and small executable programs.

As programs got bigger and bigger intel and microsoft got round this by allowing most of the program (executable) to be stored in higher memory (or as baz suggests on disk) BUT the program had to have it's core element still located in the 640k base memory. You've got to bear in mind that Intel had designed the 8086 processor (and subsequent versions like the 80186, 286, 386, 486 and 586 (also called a pentium)) with structure limited to a certain amount of RAM for programs to run. Just checked and the 286 could address 16Mbyte and the 386 could address 4Gbyte or RAM. I hope thisa is the pagefile system baz is referring to. If not ignore me.

I guess it shouldn't be turned off because although 4Gigabytes is a lot you may have concurrent programs running on your PC that may exceed this total and this would I guess be disasterous.

I'm hoping here to shed some little light on what baz has written. From memory this "flaw" in the architecture of the intel chips allowed macs (which used motorola (now called ON semiconductor) to get a head on the race and for many years Macs had the music/movie production market sown up because the 68000 micro from motorola didn't have this (obscene) restriction.

Dunno what the game is today. Anyone?

Andy

[Superhuman]

Not sure about that but I got some serious results by following the list of tweaks on www.musicxp.net
It used to be free but now it costs something like $5 but it's money well spent IMO. Check it out, they have been recommended by Steinberg (creators of Cubase) for setup tweaks to boost performance specifically for music production. I seem to remember something about pagefiles being in there too but I could be wrong, it was awhile ago...

[indiana 99]

Nice 1 Andy, that sheds a lot of light on it and explains why mac's are better for music!!

I always thought Micro$ & Intel were the same company for some unknown reason Must be the greed thing they share instead

Cheers again Andy, thumbs up mate!!!!!

[indiana 99]

Thanks SuperHuman, I had hoped this may have jogged some peoples memories about this subject that I had no clue about

Cheers Bud!!!

[GreyB]

It's been a while since I studied this but, from memory, the pagefile (it's also referred to as "virtual memory"or the swapfile) is used to supplement physical memory at times of heavy load. Typically, the pagefile is set to about 1.5 times the size of physical memory - so if you've got 2GB of RAM, Windows is likely to set your pagefile to around 3GB of hard drive space.

It has long been a tweak of the system to reduce the size of your pagefile to increase performance as Windows will often carry on using it even when you have RAM still available. To be honest, I've never seen anyone advise turning it off altogether.

You can monitor performance of your computer by accessing Task Manager (ctrl/alt/del) and selecting it from the menu. If you are running Vista you then switch to the Performance tab and, for more information, click on the Performance Monitor button. You can then monitor how well your system performs under a variety of situations (light/medium/heavy usage). It's important to do this to see how well your processor handles some high usage programs.

As Superhuman points out, there are a few good programs around that will adjust your pagefile for you but it is definitely one of those things, like editing the Registry, that you really shouldn't do unless you are confident of what you are doing. I'd guess that most modern computers can run pretty well without the pagefile but I have a nagging feeling in the backof my memory that there are still programs out there that are written to use the pagefile and might well crash if they can't find it.

There also use to be advice about switching the pagefile from dynamic to fixed as it causes much less fragmentation of the file but again I think this only something that someone who is comfortable with tweaking the system (or confident about using safe mode and restore) should attempt to do.

[indiana 99]

Very interesting GreyBrow, but what if your pc is a dedicated music machine. Do you know of any known paramaters/problems?? Excellent description btw, Inever thought about reducing the pagefile and not turning it off!!

I STILL WOULD NOT TRY THIS THOUGH, IT'S JUST A QUESTION!!

Good reading,

Baz

[LIQUID]

Advice from the guys in our tech support is that although there may be some performance improvement the PC could become unstable as some applications are hard coded to utilise the PF. Reduce the PF rather than turn it off seems to be the cautious advice on offer!

Ant

[indiana 99]

Sound advice Ant I for one, wont be messing with the file share

My thinking behind this was, that there may have been some new techniques out there to help resolve the issue. Obviously not!!!

At least it was worth looking into!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the head'sup guys, most appreciated and also from saving my system from certain death

Barry

[m4rt3z]

You might want to read this if you are using Vista or Win7!

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