by James S » Feb 9, 2003 @ 7:10pm
256MB is nothing. WinXP REQUIRES that much. The more memory you have the smaller your page file will be and thus the less XP will have to use your hard drive as virtual memory. You can have 0 RAM for all I and Windows care, it just uses your HD, but that is exactly what we DON'T want to happen, because the fastest HD is hundreds of times slower than RAM. And if data is stored in RAM then it can be sent DIRECTLY to whatever needs it, instead of data on the hard drive that has to be read into the HD cache, then out the bus to the bridge then stored into the RAM or CPU cache, and then finally to whatever requested that data, such as your graphics card or network interface card. This page file on the hard drive is particularly deadly when we're writing data at the same time as it's being read, in which case the HD's small 2 to 8MB cache is the only thing that's storing the data. The HD will wear itself out in no time going back and forth across the disk, slowing down, speeding up, extending, repositioning. An endless waltz of magnetic fields and spindles in which the slightest variation could mean trajedy, and the more it's being used the greater the chance of such a thing occuring becomes.
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