Should I disable virtual memory....

[TJohn]

to get even better performance out of games like Quake4 and F.E.A.R? Check my sig for specs.

[doctorgonzo]

Disabling virtual memory will make your computer run worse, if Windows works at all.

[Statica]

You will invariably always get vmem warnings if you do so. Leave the virtual memory alone, you will invariably see better performance out of the system with it. The real question is: why do you suspect that virtual memory is the bottleneck on your system?

[TJohn]

Thanks, I don't have any problems now... really I'm quite blown away with my new machine's performance. I was just reading this > http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=69518 and though well....

[doctorgonzo]

That thread is not accurate: it says that you can disable virtual memory when you have at least 512 MB of memory. That is simply not true; I have a gigabyte of memory and the page file is still in use. Disabling the swap file with 512 MB of memory is asking for trouble. If you had 3 or 4 GB, maybe you could do it.

In any case, disabling the swap file wouldn't accomplish much. If you want to ensure that you have as much memory as possible when gaming, close all other applications.

[TJohn]

Thank you

[Statica]

I cannot comment on the efficacies of the suggestion of turning of virtual memory. But here's what I do know .. your Virtual memory is an add-on to your physical RAM... yes I can agree that since the virtual memory uses a file on the hard drive, you are now getting a bottleneck in the hard drive access speed. However, any benefits that you may have from turning it off are going to be spent exhausted in considering how the virtual memory actually works. The virtual memory is to supplement your physical RAM, not the other way round. Which means that priority/foreground processes will almost invariably get access to the most RAM, while background processes will be relegated to the virtual memory area. By turning off your virtual memory, you are now forcing the background processes to take up space on your RAM.. .your processes like the background antivirus that you have running, the system state of your wallpaper, your desktop, whether you have the speaker icon on your system tray etc etc. are now going to be crammed into the physical RAM space! Further, I would also like you to look at the post date of the guide (I dont know if the virtual memory was updated during the last update in Oct. 05), but generally speaking since 02 - the OS has gotten larger (service packs, hotfixes, DEP and other features etc etc) - which means that XP in 2003 was theorotically lighter than XP in 2006. It also means that the XP today is more adaptive to newer technologies, DDR2 memory, SATA2 etc etc are just some of the stuff since then that dont make virtual memory as much of a bottleneck as you might think.

[TJohn]

Indeed

Thanks for the explanation