Tuneing a Computer

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 8:47 pm

Sparkfist wrote:Oh and I just remembered a way to speed up a Windows machine. If you have a second/slave drive installed move the Windows paging there. That way if Windows does start using Virtual Memery it wont slow down the speed of the main hard drive.

Now I need another hard drive.

Oh yeah, I have a 4gb and 2gb hd I'm not using.
That does make sense.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 9:26 am

Either one, Virtual member is never going to exceed the size of your RAM. I would say use the 4GB as you will have about 3GB of extra storage, not much but you never know if you might need it.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:24 pm

Sparkfist wrote:Either one, Virtual member is never going to exceed the size of your RAM. I would say use the 4GB as you will have about 3GB of extra storage, not much but you never know if you might need it.

Actually, it will if you press the system hard enough, or set the minimum high enough. In fact, if you want a good boost in Windows performance, set the minimum size of the page file to the size of the physical memory, or more. Appearently, Windows Vista does this by default. In Linux, which typically doesn't have a resizable swap file, it's recommended to set the swap partition size to twice the physical memory.

blackbox_dev · Post by **blackbox_dev** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:52 pm

tom61 wrote:In Linux, which typically doesn't have a resizable swap file, it's recommended to set the swap partition size to twice the physical memory.

Odd, because I heard that the swap partition shouldn't be more then the physical memory, or else it isn't effective.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 8:37 pm

iam7805 wrote:
tom61 wrote:In Linux, which typically doesn't have a resizable swap file, it's recommended to set the swap partition size to twice the physical memory.
Odd, because I heard that the swap partition shouldn't be more then the physical memory, or else it isn't effective.

If you know how to change partition sizes then the statement is wrong. Also the defaut is the same size of your physical RAM. The problem with the idea of needing a swap today is outdated, if you even have as little as 256MB ram you should need a swap if you're doing basic to intermediate kind of work on a Linux/BSD system. Also this comes from my instructor, "I've never had to use the swap partition, I've seen the ram used percentage to to 98% but never go over."

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Wed Jul 12, 2006 9:58 pm

Sparkfist wrote:
iam7805 wrote:
tom61 wrote:In Linux, which typically doesn't have a resizable swap file, it's recommended to set the swap partition size to twice the physical memory.
Odd, because I heard that the swap partition shouldn't be more then the physical memory, or else it isn't effective.
If you know how to change partition sizes then the statement is wrong. Also the defaut is the same size of your physical RAM. The problem with the idea of needing a swap today is outdated, if you even have as little as 256MB ram you should need a swap if you're doing basic to intermediate kind of work on a Linux/BSD system. Also this comes from my instructor, "I've never had to use the swap partition, I've seen the ram used percentage to to 98% but never go over."

Firefox + multiple tabs + multi-megapixel images, is the only time I've hit swap on my Linux system in normal desktop use. Now, it occasionally swaps out the desktop and a few other things when gaming to give the game more room.

I'm still following the old recommendation, which, at the time I heard the recommendation the swap was between 16 and 64 megabytes typically, but seeing as how the swap is a pain to resize manually, I keep it up to this day. What's 2GB out of a 160GB drive? Far worth the lost space for the added flexibility. Who knows? I might decide to design my own bill board on my compy one day.

ransoman · Post by **ransoman** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:38 am

Anyone tried running XP on a computer with 64meg RAM? That is painfull.

Post by **bicostp** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 7:59 am

I ran XP on a Pentium 1 133 based AT machine with 64 mB of RAM before. Ouchies. It wasn't as bad after I upped it to 128 MB of RAM (4x 32MB SIMM) and turned off all the shiny stuff (menu shadows, mouse shadows, the Luna look...). I also turned off a bunch of extra junk that didn't have to run, and it ran pretty well. That machine became my DOS/Win3.1 game machine and the hard drive that had XP on it is now in another PC running Fedora Core 5.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:00 am

ransoman wrote:Anyone tried running XP on a computer with 64meg RAM? That is painfull.

Yeah I hear that it's insanely slow. Infact I hear a company was trying to run XP on a PIII running at 500MHz, and only (I believe) 128MB ram. The thing took about half an hour to boot, so I'm told.

Lets just hope that Vista has the same memory management that Linux, BSD and MacOS X have. I can't image them sticking with the same model, it will only further cripple their crappy OS.

XPCportables · Post by **XPCportables** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:22 am

come on sparkfist, you know that that, is all that microsoft is good for, making something that sucks, then making it even worse every time they try to make it better, win XP SP2 anyone?

blackbox_dev · Post by **blackbox_dev** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:25 am

Sparkfist wrote:
ransoman wrote:Anyone tried running XP on a computer with 64meg RAM? That is painfull.
Yeah I hear that it's insanely slow. Infact I hear a company was trying to run XP on a PIII running at 500MHz, and only (I believe) 128MB ram. The thing took about half an hour to boot, so I'm told.

The old computers at my school took about an hour to boot. They were something like P2 with 92mb of RAM. Painful. Thank god they upgraded them to P4 with 768mb of RAM.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:25 am

XPCportables wrote:heck, even with one gig windows hurts me, I have 2 installs of XP on my compy, one SP2 and one SP1, the SP1 has ZERO updates, I have never updated it once, and it easily tripples the speed and snap factor of my SP2, and they both have the same programs installed.

So does that mean I should reinstall windows and turn the updates off? And if so, can I reinstall windows without deleting my other stuff?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:25 am

XPCportables wrote:come on sparkfist, you know that that, is all that microsoft is good for, making something that sucks, then making it even worse every time they try to make it better, win XP SP2 anyone?

Well then good luck to those of you that do a lot of PC gaming. I'd like to believe that a lot of companies will follow ID and Blizzard in that they off OpenGL and running the game on Linux/MacOS X systems, however I don't see that happening. I think most game will be stuck using DirectX for years and as such will just hamper PC gaming.

Also my quarial with Microsoft is that they hold the market of hardware support, yet they have the worst design in how they manage it. Yesterday I plugged a USB hard drive in and got a window that kept popping up mentioning that the drive letter was already used. I unplugged both, still there. Infact I had to reboot, and I don't think I should unless I am asked to after installing updates or applications.