[
no
no
Few if any
Only if the machine does not have enough baseline memory. 512 megs is more than enough for the vast majority of processes the machine would have to handle. The number of situations where going beyond 512 megs RAM is going to make a substantive difference are relatively few and far between.
Some PC tweakers are getting to be like audiophiles re the perceived impact of a change on their setup.
Just noticed I wrote threshing in place of thrashing… twice. Oh dear, the monitor pixies will never let that one lie. :smack:
What OS are you using? I know next to nothing about Winows.
A google search shows this: http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm
I’m not recommending that product at all. That’s the first result I got from the search(“ramdisk”). There may be support for this built into Windows by default. I have no clue how you would check, though.
Actually, now that I think of it, I’m not sure how effective this would be for Windows. Faster for sure, but with linux or BSD the entire graphics system/windowing can be contained in RAM, along with the web browser, word program, etc. The hard drive is almost never touched, except VM handling. I know IE is integrated into windows in such a way that it might not be worth having the binary exist in RAM all the time(it’s pre-loaded anyway, IIRC). Not to mention, I don’t know if you can specify the location of your system libraries with windows. Could be that they have to be in one of the WINDOWS subdirectories(SYSTEM?). I don’t know, so I’ll shutup 
On linux, with a 850mhz Intel Pentium III, you can expect practically instantaneous responsiveness if you have everything on a RAM disk. I’m guessing it’s between 5 and 10 times faster than a physical drive, from a user’s perspective. If you run linux/BSD, I can tell you how to do this. If you are running windows… then I can’t help you, and you have my sympathy.
The odds of you being able to tell the difference between 512 MB and 1024 MB are slim, based on the app load you describe. To the extent that you are doing audio/visual production work, or scientific computing… I’ll be wrong.
Also, given the efficiency of Windows XP’s virtual memory algorithm, unless you have an application that ABSOLUTELY, 100%, MUST LOAD INSTANTLY or else life support systems and weapons control will fail, you’re wasting your time trying to set up a RAM drive. RAM drives are nice toys for geeks, but you’d be AMAZED at how good XP is at having the bytes you really need in RAM when you need them. Ever since 95/98/ME obsoleted, actually, Windows has been very good about that.
** Carnac the Magnificent! **
Run. Don’t walk. Ok well I guess you can just click here and download iTunes. It blows WMP out of the water in terms of playing music. It allows you to import CDs (store them on your hard drive) and automatically catagorizes your music genre->artist->album. In 10 seconds I can get to any of my thousands of songs on my computer. It runs perfectly in the background on my nearly identical system to yours. The only complaint I have is that it takes a bit long to load up sometimes.
Because you know better than the Windows Memory Mangement team, I suppose? For any number of rebuttals to your (mostly irrelevant) arguments, search the Ars Technica forums for “pagefile” or “virtual memory”. It’s been beaten to death there.
AND it has a crappy UI and uses even more memory than WMP, which can also import CDs, categorize your music and allow access to your songs in under 10 seconds.
But I’m glad to see the ABM brigade is still in full swing at the SDMB. :rolleyes:
Didn’t Itchy Junior look happy playing with his father? And didn’t Scratchy Junior look happy playing with his dad until they got run over by the thresher?
::lifts hand slowly and cautiously::
I’m a Mac user, and love the Mac and could be described as a Mac zealot, but I reallly really detest iTunes. I do not need an application that thinks it knows better than me how to organize my playlists or where to put my music files!
I use Audion. It rips nicely, plays whatever you point it at, and is cross-platform (i.e, runs on MacOS 9 and MacOS X, both of the viable platforms 
)
I run XP on a 2.6G P4 and the recent switch from 512 to 1G has increased my speed by a ton.
After leaving World of Warcraft, it would take me 40 sec to a minute to reload the desktop. Now it’s more like 5-10 seconds.
I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. MPC is great. I know i’ve made the same suggestion in one or two other threads recently, but i’m gonna say it again: i use the following set-up for video, and highly recommend it:
Media Player Classic
ffdshow
RealAlternative
QuicktimeAlternative
This is a completely open source, free setup. Media Player Classic is, as Gaspode says, a great open source player with an interface based on the older Windows Media Player. The ffdshow codec library will let you play just about any video or audio you’re likely to encounter, either from files on your local computer, or from streaming sites; it also means you can avoid downloading some of the rather dodgy codec files that are running around on the internet. The RealAlternative and QuicktimeAlternative programs allow you to view Real and Quicktime files and streams without having the nagging bloated crap that is Real and (to a lesser extent) Quicktime on your computer. Media Player Classic will also play DVDs with no problem at all, allowing you to avoid other crappy DVD players like PowerDVD.
I still don’t use MPC for music, though. I prefer the organizational and music management setup of WinAmp.
Given that this thread is largely about RAM issues, i’m gonna add my voice to those who aren’t especially impressed with iTunes. I don’t like its interface that much anyway, but, more importantly, it uses considerably more memory than WinAmp.
Ha, yeah right. As I sit right now, I have 160MB/512MB free in memory yet windows is using 294MB of my swap file. Switching to another application takes about 5 seconds of thrashing since it was paged out yet the programs I’m currently using should easily be able to fit into physical memory.
Windows, for better or for worse, is hyper aggressive at keeping RAM free and dumping whatever it can into the swap, even if that’s not neccesarily what you want.
Kill the swap file f you have sufficient memory.
Can this be easily explained?
Shalmanese,
Out of curiousity, what apps were you running when you wrote that post?
I agree that XP does not always do what YOU want. It does, however, have a very, very sophisticated memory management algorithm, and usually when you see it keeping RAM free, it’s to avoid having rapid RAM consumption drive you into a state where you’re sitting there for way more than 5 seconds waiting for it to finish thrashing.
The big ones were Mozilla, Trillian and MS Visual Studio but there are also a few smallish ones that I keep hanging around as well.
I regularly see thrashing and general sulkiness with windows that lasts a prolonged period of time (at least 30 seconds) even though my memory usage is such that there really should be no thrashing. I think the MM might be fine if you use significantly more memory than you have and is probably fine if you use significantly less but it fails at the point where your working set is only slightly bigger than your physical memory.
I’ve been meaning to upgrade to 1gb of ram myself, but my situation is a little different. Due to some older (but very good) audio gear that doesn’t run on XP, I have a dual boot 98/XP machine. I’ve read the 98 uses only up to 512, and anything above is useless. My main concern is if 1gb of ram would simply be ignored by 98 or cause system instability. I know there’s a way to go in a specify the amount that 98 can see, but to be honest I’d rather plug the mem in and do nothing extra.