WOW and operating systems

[Deleted]

I need them all for work and as i have 2x28 inch monitors space is not an issue.

And pagefile is the portion of your HDD you set aside for effectively using as extra ram, i have 40 gb on 4 hdd and 3 'system controlled' on the others. It was a marked improvement over the max size you could issue in XP.
pagefile?

[Deleted]

Ram does not improve FPS anyways ? or well lower than 1-2gb is I suppose bad but does it really affect your FPS?

It does in a way. If WoW has not enough RAM available it starts using some of your HDD wich is slower.

Honestly I have 8 gigs of ram and a 64 bit OS, but any time I minimize wow and poke around on the task manager WoW is using under 2 gigs of ram. So going to a 64 bit OS probably won't change your performance at all.

Using 64-bit is not just about being able to use more RAM.

If am not mistaken Windows 32 systems only supports 3.3GB of Ram but the x64 bit OS 4GB of Ram +

PAE will allow you to use more RAM.

[Deleted]

So yes, upgrade to Windows 7. It's the best operating system around for gaming. It will need a while to get used to it, if you want you can make it look like XP, but don't do that please, if you're gonna upgrade to be stuck in the past anyway, don't upgrade at all.

This.
But if you want your icons to stay put, ultramon does that for you (best dual monitor program too)

[barlar]

Meh, its not that safe to tinker with the pagefile though unless your atleast pretty decent at comps, which I don't think he is :>

im okay with computers:P just dont know what a pagefile is:P

[Nodja]

I need them all for work and as i have 2x28 inch monitors space is not an issue.

And pagefile is the portion of your HDD you set aside for effectively using as extra ram, i have 40 gb on 4 hdd and 3 'system controlled' on the others. It was a marked improvement over the max size you could issue in XP.
pagefile?

That is a waste of space. Modern systems barely need a pagefile at all. Pagefiles were created for when your application decides to allocate a lot of memory (more that your RAM) you don't get a bluescreen saying that you're out of memory (oh yeah, it will happen even in windows 7). Unless you're into debugging large apps I recommend you to stick to a 2GB page file tops, the old 1.5 times the amount of ram formula is very outdated.

Let me simplify this for the non techies. a pagefile is basically RAM, but it's slower. It uses your disk instead of those RAM sticks that you see, but disk are very slow compared to ram, high performance disks (SSDs) read at around 220MBytes/s, regular disks read at around 40-100 MBytes/s. Writing is even slower. RAM on the other hand, DDR2-800 reads at 6400 MBytes/s, that's almost 30 times faster than your high performance disks, so when your program uses those 2 extra GBs actively, your computer if going to be fucking slow, 29 times slower to be precise (more if your disk is shitty), having an extra 38 GBs added to it is going to do nothing.

RAM footprint is NOT a way to measure a computers performance, if you have enough RAM, even if by 1 byte extra. You're good, after that the pagefile is only going to save you temporarily, and if you need more than 2GB then the software that you're running is faulty. (unless of course it's meant to use that much memory). More ram(or swap) is not going to make the difference, the tricks is to put the pagefile in a disk that had the highest performance, regardless if it's being used or not, better if not.

Windows uses your page file in a smart way, see all those services that are started when you load services.msc? Or those 1GB of shit windows loaded into the RAM, most of that shit is in the pagefile because you rarely/never use it, but it keeps it there just in case you use it. It's not really bloat, it's using memory the smart way.

Easy way to find if RAM will improve your performance, load WoW or whatever game you think is the performance could be better with more RAM, load up task manager(ctrl+alt+esc) check under the Performance tab how much memory is being used, if you ever get close to your total RAM, buy more RAM. Else keep your pagefile in a fast disk and you're cool. It's not fucking rocket science.