[Offler]

Yes it is just FAT16. Thats makes no trouble when i use it as swapdrive, but if i want to use it for newer aplications it may cause trouble.

What is also very positive is that if system crashes, Scandisk shall find no (or very few) lost data on Hdd.

Btw some friends of mine asked me to do this "tweak" with swapfile on ramdrive on their computer, but most of them use WinXP. I have no experience with XP. Shall XMSDSK start and shall XP put its swapfile on drive with FAT16?

[MDGx]

2000/XP, 98SE + ME all support FAT16 + FAT32.
Therefore you can place your 9x swap file [called paging file in 2000/XP] on any FAT16 or FAT32 drive/partition.

Try to load XMSDSK from config.sys [example]:

INSTALLHIGH=c:\xmsdsk\xmsdsk.exe 720896 Y: /c1 /t /y label Y: Scorpion

instead of loading it from autoexec.bat, or the other way around if you load it from config.sys.
Replace INSTALLHIGH with INSTALL if you don't load any upper memory manager [UMBPCI, EMM386, QEMM386, RM386 etc] from config.sys.
Reboot see what happens.

If you allocate too much RAM for xmsdsk RAMdisk, your computer performance will decrease significantly, or you may even experience errors/lockups with some apps/games.

If you are experiencing random errors with scandisk [scandskw], maybe you should consider disabling [some] overclocking features, i.e. bring back FSB or RAM timings to normal values.

HTH

[awergh]

nt4 doesnt support fat32 only fat16

[MDGx]

Sorry, forgot about NT4.

[Offler]

I usually recomend this tweak only for computer with 1,5 GB of ram or more, maintaining that 1gb shall remain as standard memory. in these cases it can boost acess to swapfile 10x and upgrade overall systen performance by 12 percent. Pretty nice trick for people with large ram

[erpdude8]

awergh, on Nov 21 2006, 03:08 AM, said:

nt4 doesnt support fat32 only fat16

WinNT4 by itself cant recognize FAT32. NT4 users will need a 3rd party driver to access FAT32 volumes

[awergh]

true but it cant be installed on a fat32 partition,
just like you have to install drivers for the mouse to get the scrollwheel to work
and drivers for usb support

[Offler]

so i've been tweaking for some time and here are some results:
At my last attempt i was trying to set standard ram to 1gb and XMSDSK ram to 512mb, but the system was unable to boot with this setting. the best setting was 800mb of ram and 720mb of xmsdsk

althought my attempts to use UMBPCI failed i recognised one positive thing.

when i used UMBFILL.COM during boot sequence i was able to run windows normally with desired memory setting. It has more advantages as i realized. Whats lilltle bit strange is that i am using it with emm386.exe (no replacement worked due to SCI IRQ bus driver which cannot be disabled)

Performance test diagnose program recognized 25 percent speed upgrade in "Large RAM" test and overally is for system more comfortable to use two memory sticks as ram, and the third one as ramdisk.

[Marius '95]

Try to disable swap file. It worked for me when I had 768MB for a few days.

[Offler]

no reaction when disabling swapfile...

Btw i have diagnosed one thing...

i have 1,5 Gb Ram.

MaxPhysPage=40000
xmsdsk 524288

This setting is not correct. Few megabytes shall not be used as standard Ram. when i opened system properties Ram size was 1.022 Mb. Then i tryed another setting:

MaxPhysPage=45000 (or edit this line completely out from system.ini)
xmsdsk 524288

Ram in system properties was set to 1.026 Mb.

This small memory area remained unused in windows mode which means some trouble when accessing memory - slowing it down in better case, crashing system in worst case.

[Fredledingue]

I just bought a second 512 Mb DDR bar yesterday so i have now 2x512 Mb.
I wanted to buy a 1Gb bar, but they didn't have in store for my 4 years old computer. +it would have been twice more expensive.
If you plan to add memory to an old machine, hurry up because they told me that the new ones are not compatible with few years old MoBo's.
Also they told me that my MoBo, thought theoricaly limited to 2Gb, could not see more than 1 Gb. But I don't the accurate value of this information. What sellers say has always to be taken with a grain of salt.

TBS, the PC recognized the 1Gb immediately.

Now I have mounted a 128 Mb ramdrive on it, so it shows 896 Mb of ram, of which 660 remains free as I type. 8) Cool.

I just want to know if I can move the swap file on 128Mb only and how to do that.
And also how to move all the "temp" folders to the ramdrive. I'v set it via autoexec.bat but it seems a lot of program still use the old c:\WINDOWS\TEMP...

[Offler]

open system.ini and find [386Enh], and add there following line

example:
[386Enh]
MinPagingFileSize=522240
MaxPagingFileSize=522240
PagingDrive=Y: (type letter of your ramdrive)

Also it is possible to edit amount of virtual ram which is available, but if Ramdrive has 128mb specify a little bit smaller swapfile. 128Mb shall be enough for swapfile but as i know i had trouble with new aplications - they required more virtual memory...

you may change some temp locations, but i dont know where

[DeadDude]

Have any of the people with problems every tried to update their BIOS?

I had extremely similar issues on a brand new gigabyte board, with ONLY 256MEGS (one stick, frist slot of 3)

I updated the BIOS to the newest one, and no more issues. I ran Memtestx86 for 3 days on all 5 towers (bought set of 5 for a business) **BEFORE** the BIOS update, and everything tested FINE.

After the BIOS update, everything works great. No more stupid VMM.EXE errors. No more BSOD from ram...

I am eager to find out if this proggy works on XP; my 2 gigs never hit 50% usage... although Oblivion peaks at about 1.5gigs ram, nothing else does. Not even encoding 2 different videos while burning a DVD and 15 torrents running...

Oh yeah, Core DUOs kick butt... I wanna *make* 98 run on this little bad boy to see how fast it really can fly...

[erpdude8]

speaking of the MemTest86+ tool, DeadDude, a new version of it was posted (1.70) at the Memtest.org site a few days ago:
http://www.memtest.org/

[galahs]

I've been mucking around with XMSDSK.EXE ramdisk but everytime I put my swap file into my RAM drive it gets listed as operating in MS DOS Compatability Mode.

I read a user had the same problem but it still worked faster than a disk drive... but would it run even faster if it was in 32bit mode?



Also my config.sys is completely empty. No HIMEM.SYS and no EMM386.EXE
Is that good or bad?

This post has been edited by galahs: 23 December 2007 - 01:43 AM

[Offler]

i am working with XMSDSK for some time now. i have 1,5 gb ram and 512 is ramdisk from it. The info about compatibility mode is saying only that disk driver is counting with fat16 harddisk. Because FDD are normally not formated by fat32 those drivers are normally counting with that.

I think that info is specially designed for situations where fat16 disk is present - here it really can help with performance.

But if you put swapfile to ramdisk you can speed up system performance dramatically even when fat16 is there present. There i am not sure that fat16 mode is not causing problems. Apps are trying to store data there in their usual way, which means that data stored here may have fat32 file names... in this point it may cause trouble, but i never encounter any.

even if i have here apps like Prey or Oblivion i cannot fill my Ram completely. I dont know why or how, but i think that the environment of memory is so "clean" than those issues do not appear so often. By oblivion and with KernelEx user cannot be sure if the system lockup is caused by system or by the app...

This post has been edited by Offler: 23 December 2007 - 10:54 AM

[diskless]

galahs, on Dec 23 2007, 07:19 AM, said:

I've been mucking around with XMSDSK.EXE ramdisk but everytime I put my swap file into my RAM drive it gets listed as operating in MS DOS Compatability Mode.

I read a user had the same problem but it still worked faster than a disk drive... but would it run even faster if it was in 32bit mode?

XMSDSK is a DOS utility. There is no 32-bit mode version of it, so it always runs in MS-DOS compatibility mode only. However, it is still very worthwhile putting as much as possible of Windows on an XMSDSK RAM drive.

Quote

Also my config.sys is completely empty. No HIMEM.SYS and no EMM386.EXE
Is that good or bad?

HIMEM.SYS is loaded by default by Windows, so an entry in Config.sys is not compulsory. It is a good idea, though, to copy HIMEM.SYS to C:\ and have DEVICE=C:\HIMEM.SYS in Config.sys. The same applies to IFSHLP.SYS and SETVER.EXE. You must do this if you want to run Windows on a RAM drive, because the RAM drive and its Windows directory will not exist when Config.sys is processed.

EMM386.EXE is not needed.

[dencorso]

Wouldn't adding an entry for XMSDSK in IOS.INI solve the compatibility mode problem? See IOS.INI TWEAKS, it is the second tip, just below CD-ROM/DVD MAX SPEED... Whatever the result, please keep us posted on it.

[galahs]

dencorso, on Dec 28 2007, 03:05 PM, said:

Wouldn't adding an entry for XMSDSK in IOS.INI solve the compatibility mode problem? See IOS.INI TWEAKS, it is the second tip, just below CD-ROM/DVD MAX SPEED... Whatever the result, please keep us posted on it.

interesting.

might be worth a try.

[diskless]

galahs, on Jan 16 2008, 04:11 PM, said:

dencorso, on Dec 28 2007, 03:05 PM, said:

Wouldn't adding an entry for XMSDSK in IOS.INI solve the compatibility mode problem? See IOS.INI TWEAKS, it is the second tip, just below CD-ROM/DVD MAX SPEED... Whatever the result, please keep us posted on it.

interesting.

might be worth a try.

This will not help because there is no protected-mode version of XMSDSK to replace the 16-bit version (no xmsdsk.vxd). Would it be possible to have an xmsdsk.vxd? I don't know, but there isn't one and the RAM drive is still very fast in compatibility mode.