Ram Optimizer?


dockthepod said:
Why does 3 gigs of ram slow you down on a 32 bit OS? I'm running 3 gigs at work and yeah, my machine sure does crawl sometimes... Is this the cause?
Rico says "No, any modern motherboard should have no problem upto atleast 4GB of RAM."
 
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prairiefire: The former. When I'm not using my PC it's in standby to use less power. I'm not leaving it switched on for 17 hours (typical day) doing nothing but a defrag. What a waste of money, and waste of wear and tear on the components too. Yes I know harddisks last longer now, but they still have a MTBF.

dockthepod: a 32-bit os supports 2^32 bytes of memory = 4294967296 bytes (4GB). This has to be shared between kernel and user land, with the kernel be global across all user apps. So the kernel itself can never use more than 2GB of RAM, regardless of whether or not the system actually has 64GB (or whatever) of RAM. The only difference is that each application can use upto 2GB of user data (thanks to virtual memory and the memory mapping unit). However, Windows isn't "smart" in this area, and strange things happen. Its not too bad in the server versions of windows (they can use whats called the "physical address extension"), but its stil troublesome. Of course, a 64-bit OS doesn't have the problem at all.

So if you have >2GB of RAM, a fast processor, and do a lot of memory intensive data crunching, it seems daft to limit yourself to a 32-bit OS, when a 64-bit one offers so much more.
 
Squidge - Interesting. I don't think I have the option of going 64 bit since our various apps have a hard enough time just switching video cards :) I do a LOT of number crunching (I develop PS3 games so I'm always compiling code/data etc) and it seems like I spend most of my day waiting around for shit to happen. Maybe I'll pull out a stick and see what happens.
 
purple_goat said:
daclassicgamingmaster said:
purple_goat said:
AHH!! Squidge says no defrag! Sam says no optimizer! :wacko:
*weeps* can I make this into a poll? trooper?
Just listen to the one who knows-all but isn't a know-it-all :rolleyes:

tell me who, oh great guru!

you arent serious are you? sam is a know it all who uses wikipedia to come up with responses. Squidge is 1,000,000 times more qualified than him. ;)
 
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:eek:

Hey, if you want to waste time/money and your harddisk on defragging your disk, don't let me stand in your way. Some people do it religiously. I just don't see the point in it comparing cost to benefit. After all, I would have thought most people would replace there PCs (or hds, or reinstall Windows due to some fubar) every 18 - 24 months anyway, which is the ultimate defrag :)
 
daclassicgamingmaster said:
purple_goat said:
daclassicgamingmaster said:
purple_goat said:
AHH!! Squidge says no defrag! Sam says no optimizer! :wacko:
*weeps* can I make this into a poll? trooper?
Just listen to the one who knows-all but isn't a know-it-all :rolleyes:

tell me who, oh great guru!

you arent serious are you? sam is a know it all who uses wikipedia to come up with responses. Squidge is 1,000,000 times more qualified than him. ;)

I never read wikipedia you stupid arse, stop covering your hill billy intelligence by trying to insult me. You know you don't have half the intelligence I have. That aside, Squidge is very much more qualified in this case.

@Purplegoat: You are a moron, I didn't recommend you defrag, I said "did you mean a HDD defragmenter", as your description of a RAM optimiser seemed much more like a description of a disk defragmenter.
 
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Defragmenting your harddrive can be useful if you play games that stream textures all the time, like the Doom3 or Halo engine does. Quake 4 used to stutter sometimes on my PC, probably because some needed textures weren´t loaded already. A defrag solved that problem.

But for everyday office or multimedia use, your harddrive doesn´t need to be defragmented.
 
I defragment once every 6 or 7 weeks. It never takes more than 15 minutes (6 & 4gb partitions :D)

It never took me that much longer on ~40Gb partitions either though, which makes me wonder if it' because I use the defrag tool that comes with Windows rather than some 3rd party one?
 
I schedule my PC to defrag every Wednesday while I sleep. Then again, I run Vista, so I need every ounce of RAM I can get my hands on.
 
I use ext3, so I don't need to defragment. It's due to the way ext3 handles placing files on the disk. There was a nice article with pretty pictures explaining it in terms even Sam could understand (I'm joking Sam, I'm sure your superior intelligence could understand the specification in its entirety) but damn me if I can find it.
 
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