Speedup your RAM with these tricks

Low RAM capacity slows down your computer speed significantly. You cannot work smoothly in a computer when it is getting slow and slow. Even though the computer speed depends on several hardware parts and their capacity/speed, you can speed up a computer by installing additional RAM card. Sometimes you may not increase RAM due to not available ram slots in the mother board. Changing motherboard can be cost effective task to fix this problem. Don't worry...... there is a solutions for this.

Windows XP comes with a special feature to increase your RAM by using your Hard Disk. It is called Virtual Memory. Also known as Paging File. You can allocate some space from your hard disk to use as a virtual memory. By default Windows XP comes with a virtual memory size of 1.5 times of RAM. (If your RAM capacity is 256MB, Virtual memory will be 384MB). This is space uses when the RAM going low in capacity.

You can change paging file or the virtual memory size and the partition of the hard disk where paging file exists at anytime as you wish. But there is few guidelines to optimize virtual memory.

• Avoid allocating virtual memory on the same partition where the system installed - Your system partition is heavily accessing drive by the operating system and because of that it will slow down the data read and write speed. And also cause to limit free space of the system partition which usually slows down the PC speed.
• Do not put a paging file on a fault-tolerant drive such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume. Paging files do not require fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant computers experience slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.
• Do not put multiple paging files on the different partitions of the same hard disk. Use only one paging file on one hard disk. If your computer consists two or more hard disks, you can create paging files in each hard disk.

How to change paging file/virtual memory

1. Click Start, click Run, and then type sysdm.cpl in the Open box.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Settings under Performance.
3. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Change under Virtual memory.
4. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file that you want to change.
5. Under Paging file size for selected drive, click Custom size, type a new paging file size in megabytes (MB) in the Initial size (MB) orMaximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

Changing windows paging file size needs restart of your computer to make changes.

Or try for the following process:

ReadyBoost is a memory extension for Windows Vista. It works very much like the swap file on the hard drive, but it is not used as an active extension to the main memory. Instead, Windows uses it to pre-cache application data for popular programs.

ReadyBoost is meant to support the new SuperFetch feature by adding more memory to the system. Microsoft's intended storage device is a USB 2.0 Flash memory stick, mainly because these products are incredibly affordable and reasonably fast. Knowing that USB 2.0 memory sticks deliver between 5 MB/s and 30 MB/s you might wonder how this makes sense.

Most USB 2.0 Flash memory devices on the market offer a capacity of 512 MB to 4 GB. There are smaller and even larger products available; the mainstream is at around 1 GB. These storage devices are very popular, as they are durable and small, and they can be used as a key fob. Many users use USB Flash memory sticks today as they used to jockey floppy disks.

The strength of Flash memory isn't exception transfer performance, but access times that can almost be called nonexistent. Even if you got a memory stick that doesn't provide more than 15 MB/s, it will still benefit from its DRAM-like access times. Compared to a hard drive, which might not be able to provide requested data at its maximum transfer performance of 60-80 MB/s due to higher priority system requests, the USB 2.0 Flash device should be available for serving the SuperFetch purpose. Even the separation of swapped data on the hard drive, and superfetched application data on a USB Flash device provides a small advantage.

When you check out our test results later on you will realize that the memory expansion by means of an USB 2.0 Flash memory device does indeed have a positive impact on application launch time. If you already have a high-speed USB 2.0 Flash memory device at 512 MB or higher capacity you should consider plugging it into an available USB 2.0 port. Windows will prompt you as you plug it in, but instead of opening an Explorer window to access the device's content you can now assign it for use with ReadyBoost. You can use the whole capacity or reserve a smaller capacity for ReadyBoost. It's important to know that Windows doesn't store critical data onto the USB device, which means that you can remove it at any time without facing any kind of data loss. The only impact might be longer application launch times.

Test WorkFlow:

First of all we installed Windows Vista Enterprise from scratch and added all required drivers. As we finished the installation we set a system restore point, because we recreated this clean system state (with no impact of SuperFetch learning from our testing activity) for every complete set of benchmarks. We used Microsoft Outlook with a 1.5 GB PST file, the Internet Explorer 7 with a locally stored website and the OpenOffice Writer with a huge press release document as our applications to test SuperFetch and ReadyBoost. Here is our testing sequence:

• Boot Windows Vista
• Wait 2 minutes

First Run

• Start Internet Explorer
• Wait 5 min (15 minutes if ReadyBoost USB 2.0 Flash device is attached for the first time)
• Start Microsoft Outlook
• Wait 2 minutes
• Start OpenOffice Writer
• Wait 2 minutes
• Close OpenOffice Writer
• Close Microsoft Outlook
• Close Internet Explorer
• Wait 2 minutes

Second Run

• Start Internet Explorer
• Wait 2 minutes
• Start Microsoft Outlook
• Wait 2 minutes
• Start OpenOffice Writer
• Wait 2 minutes
• Close OpenOffice Writer
• Close Microsoft Outlook
• Close Internet Explorer
• Wait 2 minutes

Third Run

• Start Internet Explorer
• Wait 2 minutes
• Start Microsoft Outlook
• Wait 2 minutes
• Start OpenOffice Writer
• Wait 2 minutes
• Close OpenOffice Writer
• Close MicrosoftOutlook
• Close Internet Explorer
• Reboot and start 2nd or 3rd cycle

We measured the startup time for Microsoft Office 2007 and the OpenOffice Writer 2.1