Introduction I was using Gavotte's edition of the Windows RAMDisk driver for a while in my windows XP installation for a while already and my results were so far really good. Using the RAMDisk driver I was able to use my full 4GB RAM in my Windows 32 Bit environment. Question is actually: How does it work? If Microsoft limits Windows to 3GB RAM how can this be extended? Answer: Depending on the used hardware and BIOS configuration the non-usable memory between 3GB and 4GB (this is a area for reserved addresses for physical devices) is remapped to the area above 4GB.
Windows XP/Vista/7 32Bit editions are limited to 4GB RAM addresses so the memory above 4GB is just 'unused'. The Gavotte RAMDisk is able to set the RAMDisk in the area above 4GB memory addresses and can enable the usage of this area for other purposes.
I use the RAMDisk for setting my page file to this area but you can also use it for setting the TEMP folder or other stuff there. It is just important to know that the RAMDisk is not persistent - so don't store any important stuff there - every reboot or power cycle the content is lost - so temporary files can be stored very good at this location. I came across the RAMDisk driver when reading the famous German computer magazine c't which published an article in edition 7/2009, page 78 called 'Ghost-Memory' (translated from German) Installation in of Gavotte RAMDisk in Windows 7 Step 1: Download RAMDisk Package First you need to download the RAMDisk driver from a suitable location. Use Google to find a file called.
GavotteRAMDisk1.0.4096.5200811130.7z or GavotteRAMDisk1.0.4096.5200811130.zip.unzip the content to a suitable folder. Step 2: Enforce PAE mode in Windows 7 Open a command line with elevated right (=run as administrator) and type the command. Bcdedit /set pae ForceEnable Run bdcedit and validate the result. 'pae' should be listed as shows below: Step 3: Reboot Reboot your PC to have the PAE mode effective.
Does Windows 7 (Ultimate) 32-bit support my 4GB RAM, or do I need to. And after you do all the SP1 and other updates, 64bit ends up being.
Step 4: Configure PAE mode for RAMDisk In explorer locate the file 'ram4g.reg' within the extracted set of files from the RAMDisk, double click the file to add the registry settings. The content of the REG file should look like this: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 HKEYLOCALMACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Services RRamdisk Parameters 'UsePAE'=dword:00000001 Step 5: Install RAMDisk Navigate to the folder where the RAMDisk files have been extracted and start 'ramdisk.exe' with administrator permissions. In the GUI of ramdisk.exe click on 'Install Ramdisk'. After you clicked the button there will be a warning displayed by Windows Security to validate of you really would like to install the RAMDisk, click on 'Install this driver software anyway'.
You need to wait a bit, on my box it took 30 seconds to complete the installation. If completed the GUI should display something like: Also you'll notice that a drive 'R: ' is now available in your Windows Explorer using the size of your missing memory between 3GB and 4GB. Step 6: Reboot (again) Reboot (again) to validate that RAMDisk is installed correctly. After reboot the RAMDisk should be displayed in Explorer as drive R: again. Step 7: Enjoy Now you can be sure to be able to use the RAMDisk.
I personally use it as swap space. To set it up as swap space (swapping from RAM to RAM) you. Right click on 'Computer' in Windows Explorer. pick 'Properties'.
then use the menu on the left for 'Advanced System Settings'. in the following dialog use the tab 'Advanced'. in the group 'Performance' click the 'Settings.' Button. on the following dialog use tab 'Advanced'. in the group 'Virtual Memory' click on 'Change.' .
in the following dialog (seems very advanced at this step already:-) unselect 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives' checkbox. Select your RAMDisk drive in the list box. Select 'Custom Size'. Enter e.g. 1000 into 'Initial size' box. Enter e.g. 1000 into 'Maximum size' box (whereas my RAMDisk had space of 1022MB available).
Click on 'Set' button. Close the dialog with 'OK'. Close the dialog with 'OK'. Accept to reboot After reboot you can enjoy having a computer swapping from RAM to RAM. References.
Official Gavotte Homepage (seems to be not existing:-)??. Attachment Size 160.59 KB. Hello Jens, thank you for this nice description. 1) How can i be sure that the RAMdisk does not eat memory that is usually visible in my system.
My Computer property reports 3.43 GB of 4GB RAM is usable. I am thinking if i should choose 512 MB as RAMDISK or 768 MB. How could i see if i loose normally usable RAM to RAMDISK? 2) If i had up another 4GB of RAM to a total of 8GB to my computer, how could i use 4.5 GB as RAMdisk? I saw RAMDISK is using fat 32 so one large volume would not work as swap file could not be larger than 2GB. Should i use multiple smaller ramdisks? Is that possible?
BR and thank you for you explanation. Sven PS: Your captas are quite hard to answer. I had windows 7 32 bit with 8 gb and gavotte ramdisk running for approx 1 year. When I first installed the Ramdisk I noticed it set the ramdisk size as 4.74 GB which I found troubling but as initial tests didn't come up with any issues I just stopped caring about that issue.
I found it troubling because the GPUs also use the RAM, as very famously known from Vista times with people complaining about not having their 4 GB fully available. MS said this was due to driver problems. Well looks like Gavotte ignores those driver problems since it seems it can take year(s) of use to find them.
Long story short - I had pagefile on the ramdisk and everything worked quite fine until Flash started crashing and then I started to find that running a file compare resulted in different results each time. And OCCTPT reported CPU error.
All the problems disappeared once I disabled the pagefile (it was set to min 2000 MB max 3000 MB auto-resize) that was on the ramdisk. It may be too early to say if this problem was incompatibility with use of pagefile on the ramdisk, the fact I had changed in recently to auto-resizing (it seems the problems started around that time) or what. The fact that the file compares gave different results randomly suggests that file corruption was also possible during copying.
Now it may be all related to the auto-resizing pagefile but personally I'd rather have a ramdisk that I can be sure of that it is not overlapping GPU memory and that pagefile is fully supported on the ramdisk. I have no use for 32bit that can't have pagefile on the ramdisk reliably so I am going back to 64 bit (64 bit support on debuggers is improving slowly so my 32 bit needs are reducing). I'll add a note here that I was not using the hack to make 32bit support 8+GB because I don't want to use anything that could possibly interfere with windows update patching, and modifying the OS files has potential to do so. Now if you do all your browsing in a VM or another machine and are able to run the modified OS with all networking disabled, which should be doable (you should be able to pass eg. USB WLAN stick to WM without enabling networking on the host), or use a hypervisor solution, then by all means hack your OS.
Otherwise doing a permanent mod to kernel is something I personally would not do unless you have systems in place to alert when that kernel file is patched by MS and can verify that it's actually patched (for security exploits) even though you are using your hacked file. I am running Windows 32 bits in a 4GB RAM system. I followed the instructions and everything went fine apparently.
I have now a R: Drive with 1GB. I have also done the setup to have no pagefile on any drive other than R, with 1 GB. However Windows gives me a message at startup saying it has created a temporary pagefile in C: with 2GB. And when looking at disk activity in resource monitor I can see it is being used.
No disk activity is shown for drive R. Why is Windows creating this pagefile in C: despite having specified I don't want it? Can you please help? Do NOT put a swapfile on a RAM-drive. It is absolutely pointless and other than one or two very specific edge cases, provides zero benefit. When you put your swap file on a RAM-drive, you waste physical ram for the swapfile which could have otherwise been used for programs to avoid having to use the swapfile. This is made much worse if the swapfile on the RAM-drive is only a complementary file since the system will always use the one on the system drive (and usually other volumes on earlier drive letters) before eventually getting to the one on the RAM-drive.
You could disable all swapfiles other than the one on the RAM-drive, but not having a pagefile on the system drive has serious consequences (for one thing, it disables crash dumps). If you want to reduce paging to disk, then you can disable the swapfile altogether by setting the pagefile on each drive to none; that way the system keeps memory in RAM instead of paging to disk, but of course this has its own rammifications (plus the system doesn’t immediately move program memory to disk anyway, it first moves them to another part of RAM). Here’s an explanation and discussion. I have a 4GB system on D2700 nettop, win 7 home basic sp1 32bit, Maxtor 160GB 3,5' hard disk and the system obviously leave me only 2,99GB memory. Enabling PAE and Gavotte the system works, or better starts. But with strange results. I created a ramdisk of 768MB, as selected in menu of gavotte (I have 1GB unused), but it creates a ram disk (label: RAMDISK-PAE) of 4GB (checked on disk properties).
At the beginning, the used ram is 700MB and the total physical memory is 3060MB. I started to copy files, the system gave me a not enough space errror after I effectively copied about 4GB of files. In the meantime and also at the end of copy the memory usage of system was always 700MB on 3060MB. So, what the hell is happening? Some other info: I Installed floatled, an utility who shows which partition is reading/writing, and seems that files was really read on a disk and write on ramdisk. From ramdisk I can cancel files but not some directories (!): I always checked if read only flag was enableb, but disabling it some directories was canceled, others not. Cant believe, that there is solution so fantastic and so secret.
Because it took me very long time to solve. All above solution does not work for me. I have 6GB and WIN 7 say 6 installed, 2 usable. When I installed RAM Disk, it eat memory from 2GB usable.
Not from above 2GB. Of course bios is seted up well. Limit in msconfig set to NO no limit. THE SOLUTION IS: Windows 7 32-bit with full 4 GB or 8 GB RAM support, Even up to 64GB!!! Works absolutely perfect. I can use 6GB of RAM in WIN 7 32bit.
It is true, that now it could be intelligent to try RAM disk to SWAP to RAM to even increase the system speed. If you have more RAM you need it is fine method. I also tested eboostr, which is just made for that purpose. An enlightening article. Here is an application elsewhere, a challenging one, if you can resolve. I used to run mcafee 5.400 under dos command, booting with cd (minipe xp). It had been fun.
Eversince newly released mobos must comply to vista-standard, microsoft has been poisoning the usage of wxpsp3 with its updated service pack 3. First with its UAA Bus Driver for HD Audio (error 0xE000027)). Then with its ridiculuous BCD (Boot Configuration Data) and then pushing the mobo producers not to embed IDE controller (a disk read occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart). Intel motherboards are the worst one. They can not beat the AMD in 64-bit technology. Most intel mobos love to fail to provide the system to access the high memory area.
Crash, blue screen, reboot. Some of the worst are G41 and G31 chipsets. Enough for the beetching. My problem is that windows nowadays love to limit the system to access the 'wasted, unused RAM', by replying 'Program too big to fit in memory'. Back in the early 1990s, whenever computers were provided without harddisk, I used to create a RAM disk to reserve the life of the 1.44 MB and/or 1.2 MB disk drive. I copied the WordStar (ws7) and/or 123 programs to the RAM disk. Although the RAM was 4 MB, the computer worked much faster than to access the diskette.
It was like a lightening speed, back that days. Jens, and anybody, can you help me out with this thing? Thank you anyway. I've tested the setup after I upgraded my machine to 8GB RAM.
This was also working, I had 3GB available RAM and a 5GB RAM Disk. I tried to enable 5GB as Swap space but unfortunately Windows is limited to 4GB Swap per drive:-) But you can still put the%TEMP% folders to the RAM drive. Thanks & Best Regards, Jens Scheffler -Original Message- From:. jensscheffler dot de mailto:. jensscheffler dot de On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Montag, 15. August 2011 23:58 To:.
jensscheffler dot de Subject: Feedback Gavotte RamDisk Eugene sent a message using the contact form at. I have successfully used the ramdisk on systems with 4GB of memory. I get a disk of between 768 and 1 GB depending on the machine.
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I want to double my RAM to 8 GB. Will Gavotte be able to use the additional memory (have you tested that personally)? Hi Jens, thanx for the info.
I've followed all your instructions, work nice, but i didn't see any 'big' differences. Oya, I have 4GB's of RAM on Win7 Ultimate 32-bit. It says only 2.75GB usable.
So i set the RAM-Disk for 1GB I have some questions:. Do we really must do the ForceEnable option on PAE with bcdedit?. How about the Paging File on C:? Do we really must shut it off (No Paging File) and use only the RAM-Disk. OR use both of them?.
As i Set initial size to 1000MB and max size as 1000MB, and the result is: i always receive a Low Disk Space Notification. Any clue for this? Thanx for your answer Regards, i'm from Indonesia, forgive my bad English:-).
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