Too much ram.

[dorion]

I went all stupid and bought another 8GB of ram for my computer. It's nice seeing 16GB and all but Superfetch is letting me down.

Back when I had 8GB Superfetch would keep no more than 200MB of my ram free. Now with 16GB Superfetch seems to be confused and never tries to use my vast(8GB-10GB) amount of free memory.

The articles I can find on Superfetch are things like, "what is it?" and "can I turn it off?" Where are the articles for the stupid idiot that wants to tell Superfetch to cache files better?

Don't tell me about ramdisks unless you know of a free ramdisk that allows partitions greater than 4GB.

 

[Cerb]

How will it cache files better? If you don't use enough files often enough, it can't know to cache them. 16GB is a massive amount of RAM for a non-workstation, and there is a limit to how much data can reasonably cached for given workload.

I've seen file servers with several GBs of RAM that never even hit 400MB, FI. You have to use enough data often enough for the OS to be able to either predict that it can be useful to not flush, or useful to load before you may need it.

Do you really go about using 10+ GB of programs and non-unique data all the time?

 

[Emulex]

i thought superfetch is disabled with ssd?

 

[Dadofamunky]

Just turn it off. IIRC, it's irrelevant with 8GB or more of RAM.

 

[groberts101]

I would leave superfetch enabled with HDD and turn it off with SSD. If using SSD the SSD Tweaker app is a nice little one click tool.

 

[dorion]

It was just so cheap.

Maybe I should start folding or something.

 

[dma0991]

You should start playing around with virtual machines to at least put your RAM to good use.

 

[Genx87]

i thought superfetch is disabled with ssd?

That is what the SSD Toolbox from Intel did when I fired up the management tools.

 

[lowrider69]

It was just so cheap.

Maybe I should start folding or something.

What's even cheaper is not buying it, zero dollars. That's a tremendous amount of ram. Reminds me of people who buy stuff that's on sale that they don't need. "Hey I saved $8 it's usually $20, I got it for $12". So you wasted $12.

 

[thespyder]

What's even cheaper is not buying it, zero dollars. That's a tremendous amount of ram. Reminds me of people who buy stuff that's on sale that they don't need. "Hey I saved $8 it's usually $20, I got it for $12". So you wasted $12.

LOL. My wife does that all the time. "Look honey. I just saved $8 on something we will never use." Doh!!

As a tangential question, I have a P5WDH mobo (max 8gb RAM) and I just upgraded to Windows 7. I have 4gb (DDR2 800) installed and when I fired up for the first time, the system recognized that I had 4gb but stated only 3gb usable???

Is this normal? What (if anything) can I do to fix this?

 

[dma0991]

LOL. My wife does that all the time. "Look honey. I just saved $8 on something we will never use." Doh!!

Women. nuff said

LOL. My wife does that all the time. "Look
As a tangential question, I have a P5WDH mobo (max 8gb RAM) and I just upgraded to Windows 7. I have 4gb (DDR2 800) installed and when I fired up for the first time, the system recognized that I had 4gb but stated only 3gb usable???

Is this normal? What (if anything) can I do to fix this?

I am predicting that your Windows 7 is 32bit version and it won't register anything more than 3.25GB.

 

[thespyder]

I am predicting that your Windows 7 is 32bit version and it won't register anything more than 3.25GB.

You would be correct. So I am stuck?

When purchasing Windows 7, it actually came with 64 bit disk as well. Is it too late to upgrade (again) to 64? would that help/harm anything?

thanks in advance.

 

[dma0991]

You would be correct. So I am stuck?

When purchasing Windows 7, it actually came with 64 bit disk as well. Is it too late to upgrade (again) to 64? would that help/harm anything?

thanks in advance.

To use anything more than 3GB you would need a 64bit OS. Since you already have a Windows 7 64 bit disc might as well put it to good use. Would not harm that much but you would see a little bit more RAM consumed during idle compared to a 32bit OS which is not a big deal. It would help you if you intend to max it out at 8GB in the future.

 

[Voo]

To use anything more than 3GB you would need a 64bit OS.

To nitpick a bit - actually a 32bit OS can address up to 2^36byte of data on a modern CPU with PAE and you should be able to hack Win7 to support it - but really not worth the effort.

So yes upgrading to a 64bit OS will bring you several advantages, the largest one definitely being the ability to easily address more RAM (while using a bit more RAM at the same time compared to the 32bit version).
Just note that you can't update from 32 to 64bit, so a new install will be in order - and you better make sure that you don't use ancient printers or other hardware where no 64bit drivers exist.

 

[ochadd]

On your average home computer it's going to be very difficult to try and make use of 16GB of memory. I've got 8GB and have a selection of 4-5 newish games. One or two are played every day and all are played each week. I've usually got 1-2GB unused with Superfetch enabled.

 

[lowrider69]

Women. nuff said

lol. I didn't want to stereotype, but ahhh...yeah.

 

[dorion]

What's even cheaper is not buying it, zero dollars. That's a tremendous amount of ram. Reminds me of people who buy stuff that's on sale that they don't need. "Hey I saved $8 it's usually $20, I got it for $12". So you wasted $12.

Wasn't exactly twelve dollars. The sale did convince me to buy it but if I had waited I would've bought it later at full price. I just gotta scratch my hardware itch every now and then.

 

[Nothinman]

Just turn it off. IIRC, it's irrelevant with 8GB or more of RAM.

Actually the more memory the better because it can preload more pages from disk into memory proactively.

When purchasing Windows 7, it actually came with 64 bit disk as well. Is it too late to upgrade (again) to 64? would that help/harm anything?

Technically there is no upgrade, you're looking at a fresh install from scratch. But if you actually want to use all of your hardware then you don't have a choice because of how MS has crippled their 32-bit client OSes.

 

[XLNC]

Here are things you can do with extra RAM:
-Setup virtual machines to learn a new OS like Linux, or for safer web surfing.
-Force browser's cache to memory for faster surfing. Firefox supports this, and it's noticeable.
-Buy a decent ramdisk software. Dataram RAMdisk is only $15. You bought 16GB of RAM, but can't spend $15 for software? It even saves files at shutdown.
-If you're a gamer, you can pretty much redirect an entire game folder to said ramdisk. That HAS to make a difference.
-Last but not least, you can most likely sell it for a profit a couple of years from now.

Atleast, these are the things I'm planning to do with my new build w/ 16GB RAM.

 

[taltamir]

1. Superfetch improves performance even with an SSD. leave it on.
2. It not using the whole thing is no reason to turn it off.
3. An AMD64 bit OS (aka x86_64 aka x64) lets you use all the new features of the AMD64 architecture (Every x86 processor made since 2004), which include MORE then just addressing more ram. Max theoretical performance increase is between 400 and 500%. Hash calculations have been benchmarked to show 300-400% speedup, divx encoding about 60% speed, x264 0% speedup, and I personally benchmarked (the other figures were from websites) 7z compression to be 23% faster in AMD64 mode.
The reason I call it AMD64 and not 64bit is because it is not the only, or even the first, 64bit architecture around.
Anyways, even if you are not going to use more than 3GB of RAM, you should still use an x64 version of windows for that extra performance. furthermore, a variety of security features are exclusive to x64 versions of windows.

@OP: I am sorry, I don't know of any way to help you.

 

[Emulex]

well if you have 3 browser windows (IE,FF,CHROME) and outlook, excel word, each process can have up to 4gb of ram. thats 16gb right there.

remember 4gb virtual per 32bit app. old windows 32bit was 2/2 or 3/1 since the o/s needed to map its ram/buffers somewhere. since that doesn't happen in 64bit much you have nearly entire 32bit address space as ram and 32 bit is 4gb last time i checked

 

[Nothinman]

well if you have 3 browser windows (IE,FF,CHROME) and outlook, excel word, each process can have up to 4gb of ram. thats 16gb right there.

remember 4gb virtual per 32bit app. old windows 32bit was 2/2 or 3/1 since the o/s needed to map its ram/buffers somewhere. since that doesn't happen in 64bit much you have nearly entire 32bit address space as ram and 32 bit is 4gb last time i checked

A 32-bit process only gets 4G of VM if it's marked LargeAddressAware, otherwise it gets the default of 2G. And that's VM, not physical memory.

And there's still a VM split with a 64-bit OS, it's just that the VM address range is so large right now that it's not affecting anything just like back when 32-bit first took over and 4G of memory was unthinkable.

 

[boozie]

lol. I didn't want to stereotype, but ahhh...yeah.

"BUT IT'S ON SALE, I SAVED US MONEY. See? I'm a good shopper."

But but but.....

There's not an easy way to win this argument I've tried and failed multiple times.

 

[dorion]

-Buy a decent ramdisk software. Dataram RAMdisk is only $15. You bought 16GB of RAM, but can't spend $15 for software? It even saves files at shutdown..

I guess I never checked the prices of Dataram RAMdisk, heard good things about the freeware(4GB partitions) but I didn't want to dive in and be disappointed.

 

[lowrider69]

Wasn't exactly twelve dollars. The sale did convince me to buy it but if I had waited I would've bought it later at full price. I just gotta scratch my hardware itch every now and then.

I know it wasn't $12, I was using anything as an example.

I'm a reformed hardware junkie so i've been through it.