RAM - How much is enough?

I'm toying with the notion of doubling my RAM from 512 mb of DDR333 to a full gigabyte.I have an AMD XP2400, 2 - 40 Gb HDDs, and a GForce4 Ti4200 video card.Has anybody had any experiences with going with this much RAM? Was there a noticable difference in MSTS, or any other applications?Thanks,MC

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RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-12-03, 08:16 PM, (1) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, griffinmt, Oct-12-03, 09:34 PM, (2) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, mttcrlsn, Oct-12-03, 09:42 PM, (3) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, dgauci, Oct-12-03, 10:11 PM, (4) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, Stooopid_person, Oct-13-03, 01:11 AM, (6) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, dgauci, Oct-13-03, 09:46 AM, (10) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, jwtitus, Oct-13-03, 12:43 PM, (13) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, railnut, Oct-13-03, 01:34 PM, (14) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-15-03, 10:46 PM, (27) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, asmith46, Oct-15-03, 03:48 AM, (22) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-15-03, 04:47 AM, (23) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, dgauci, Oct-15-03, 09:51 AM, (24) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, dgauci, Oct-12-03, 10:14 PM, (5) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, Koziolean, Oct-13-03, 03:32 AM, (7) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, ASR_Q301, Oct-13-03, 08:12 AM, (8) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, lnghairedwizard, Oct-13-03, 09:59 AM, (11) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, enocell, Oct-13-03, 03:08 PM, (15) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, MasterChief, Oct-13-03, 09:07 AM, (9) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, heffed, Oct-13-03, 12:10 PM, (12) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, LoneWolf, Oct-13-03, 05:47 PM, (16) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-13-03, 05:58 PM, (17) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, LoneWolf, Oct-14-03, 11:09 AM, (18) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, jwtitus, Oct-14-03, 07:27 PM, (19) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-14-03, 07:45 PM, (20) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, MasterChief, Oct-15-03, 00:04 AM, (21) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, jwtitus, Oct-15-03, 07:14 PM, (25) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, derekmorton, Oct-15-03, 07:27 PM, (26) RE: RAM - How much is enough?, heffed, Oct-16-03, 03:29 AM, (28)

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MSTS appears to use about 128Mb, the OS can use 128Mb, so 256Mb 'should' be sufficient.People seem to agree that 512Mb is a good minimum.
Going above this is unlikely to show any difference in MSTS.Derek

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We must assume that you are running WXP or W2K. If not, then you are already at your usable limit. Not positive about WME, but W9x will not utilize mor than 512MB.If you do not 'experience' any issues without the additional memory, don't make it a priority. On the otherhand, if you have the spare slot, 512mb is not excessivly priced these days.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com
http://www.geocities.com/tcmrrc/

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If you are doing routes 1GB will make things much smoother. Otherwise playing the game with more than 512MB seems not to be as much of an impact as the limiting factor becomes the hard drive transfer rate. We have noted at work that computers with 256MB and Win2K/XP seem happier in general work. Games and photoediting seems to be at a happy point of 512MB. CAD, programing and video editing seems falls under the "get as much as will fit in the system and pocketbook affords."--
Matt, Network Specialist
Herrington (BNSF milepost 295)
La Crosse, Wisconsin

Hills, Prairies & Rivers Route

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>Not positive about WME, but W9x will not utilize mor than 512MB. This notion has been discussed and dis-proven to death in these forums. Search the archives. I fully used 768Mb with Windows 98SE before my switch to WinXP.

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>I fully used 768Mb with
>Windows 98SE before my switch to WinXP. But you have adjusted the registry for it to work!

-----You are reading my signature now, don't waste your time reading it!-----
Or probably, maybe you should waste your time reading it.
Eh, where did my signature go?
Oh, here it is, the one you are reading right now? Can't you see it? I know I know, it's probably too bright to see it.
Hey, look at my avatar, nice right? I drew it with my own hands holding the mouse in Paint, with the pencil tool!
It's a picture of me in Planet Stooopid, where everything is the same as what you call "Earth" except that we are called "aliens" in your planet.
Anyway, I warned you not waste time reading my signature! You have just wasted probably about 30 seconds reading it, where you could have spent the time doing better things, like maybe reading the next post below if there is one...

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>>I fully used 768Mb with
>>Windows 98SE before my switch to WinXP.
>
>But you have adjusted the registry for it to work! No I didn't. You don't need to change anything in the registry. The line you change is in the System.ini file and is well documented by Microsoft. We've covered this ground a multitude of times before.

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I also was told Win98SE couldn't use more than 512Mb RAM. After a little jucidious tweaking of system.ini, mine now runs very reliably with a full gig. If you have the drive(s) partitioned to locate the swap/page file(s) at the leading edge(s), and direct the OS to use it exclusively, with minimum and maximum values set equal (at a value best suited for your system) everything will run faster.

JW Titus - Busy fixing what's broke and breaking what's not.

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Also, with more ram, the machine uses the swap file much less. Vastly improving machine performance.

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>If you have the drive(s) partitioned to locate the swap/page file(s) at the
>leading edge(s), and direct the OS to use it exclusively,How do you do that?>with minimum and maximum values set equal (at a value best suited for your system) everything will run faster. No it wont. The primary directory is at the other end of the disk, so when swapping the heads will be going between one end of the disk and the other. (seeking is the slowest move the disk can do)Derek

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I have W98SE on an 866 PentiumIII with a 32meg Nvidia TNT video card, and 384meg RAM utilizing 3 of 4 available slots (3 x 128). MSTS works pretty good when I run only one route at a time and isolate the rest of them at startup. I'm trying to make this old machine last as long as possible due to economic circumstances, and from many posts I've seen here, W98 runs MSTS with fewer glitches, but I can afford to add more RAM since it's cheap. Any suggestions? Will the OS recognize any amount of new RAM I add to the fourth slot (as long as its the correct type, of course)? Is there really a maximum that W98 will recognize and use? I have set virtual memory to 2.5 times the size of RAM, ie: 960meg. I read somewhere that this is the optimum; is it? I also moved my swap file to the front of the disk so it stays unfragmented, and this seems to help too. I guess my main question is, how much more RAM can I add effectively? Thanks.
-Al

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Hi Al,You would be better to start a different thread for your issue, this one is too long now."W98 runs MSTS with fewer glitches"You don't say what you are comparing to, which is likely XP.
On your old hardware I would stay with 98. XP is fine on later machines and the majority here find it far more reliable that 98.I would not spend any more money on the machine, I would be saving for a new one.Setting VM to 2.5 times has not been recommended since that days of W95 but the real reason was that RAM was very expensive and nobody had enough.
These days nearly everybody has enough RAM so a VM of RAM + 12Mb is enough.Derek

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>from many posts I've seen here, W98 runs MSTS with fewer glitchesWith proper hardware and software settings, Windows XP runs circles around Win98 both in speed and stability. The majority of time you hear reports to the contrary, it can be traced back to the user or marginal hardware/software. Your TNT video card would fall into the category of marginal hardware.>Will the OS recognize any amount of new RAM I add to the fourth >slot (as long as its the correct type, of course)?Depends on your computer BIOS and motherboard.>Is there really a maximum that W98 will recognize and use?According to Microsoft, 1Gb of RAM is the maximum for Windows 9.x if Windows is configured properly.>I have set virtual memory to 2.5 times the size of RAM, ie: 960meg. >I read somewhere that this is the optimum; is it?WAY too much, you have to keep the virtual memory setting well below 512Mb to avoid memory issues especially if you add more than 512Mb of physical RAM.With 512Mb or more of RAM, a fixed swap file size of 128-256Mb should be more than adequate.Your 32Mb TNT video card is your biggest bottleneck, adding more RAM won't overcome that obstacle.

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My home machine with WinXP uses 768Mb, my work machine with Win 2000 has 1Gb of RAM. Both show big performance boosts with the extra memory. You can never have too much money or memory.

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Plan for the future, e.g MSTS 2. Too much memory is never enough. (Although I can't see anybody requiring more than 2gb for a long time).Koz

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I got Windows ME (feels sick). 384mb DDR, 866Mhz CPU (gotta upgrade that!), 80GB hard disk, TNT2 Model 64 graphics card, a keyboard ummmm. But hopefully I might send this to the scrapper next year, just in time for MSTS 2. I get about 13 fps when I drive 2 NALW C44-9W's on a 50 car stack train down Marias. I have heard some people get about 30-40 fps!!!! :S - hehe.
>Mike Forster<
Perth, Westen Australiapacificnational_nr103@hotmail.com

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RE: "I got Windows ME (feels sick). 384mb DDR, 866Mhz CPU (gotta upgrade that!), 80GB hard disk, TNT2 Model 64 graphics card, a keyboard ummmm. But hopefully I might send this to the scrapper next year, just in time for MSTS 2. I get about 13 fps when I drive 2 NALW C44-9W's on a 50 car stack train down Marias."I used to have an 8oo mhz amd Duron CPU.....(with a 64mb vid card) after i switched to an athlon 1700+ mhz CPU, I got a drastic increase in framerates!!!...You can get a 1700 mhz or greater CPU and a motherboard for under $130 and use your old RAM, HDD, Case & power supply etc.....Bill Bzak aka Longhairedwizard"The Keystone Works"

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If you change the video card, you will at least double your framerate. TNT2 M64 was slower than a Voodoo2 (I tested in early '99).Even a GF2 MX400 will be much faster, and GF4MX better yet. If you have money, you can buy any card you want.

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"plan for the future... MSTS 2 "Good point. What started me to thinking about this was an article I read about speeding up your system; it mentioned that 3D games (among other applications) are real memory hogs, and while my computer does OK in MSTS, there's always room for improvement.I'm running Windows 2000, so my system (motherboard) will handle much more memory (up to 3 Gig, I believe) than I currently have.MC

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I have 1.2GB of RAM.More RAM won't do much for MSTS, but it helps just about everything else. Especially if you are into multi-tasking and have several applications open at the same time.-Jeff

Union Pacific is my drug.

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I'm running 1.5 Gb of DDR333 under Win2K myself. No problems. What I have found makes a much bigger difference for some apps is virtual memory. If your hard drives are set up with several smaller partitions you can get around the 4092 Mb virtual memory limit by setting up each partition (logical drive) with virtual memory. Software utilizing virtual memory will see it all as one large contiguous chunk and use it.As an example, my favorite graphics editing package, Micrografx Picture Publisher 8, used to choke when I started editing images of several hundred megabytes size despite my having the 1.5 gigs of main memory. I came to realize that it didn't matter how much physical memory I had because it was relying upon virtual memory for it's caching. After a search of the MS Knowledge Base I discovered this little trick with virtual memory, applied it, and haven't had a hiccup since.

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Hi LoneWolf,W2k with 1.5Gb of ram does not 'rely' on virtual memory.The difference in VM between w9x and the NT kernel is:-w9x used VM on demand, IE when it 'needed' VM it would try and get some.NT on the other hand will allocate VM when the program or file is loaded into RAM.NT therefore doesn't 'rely' on VM, just has it ready in case it needs to swap.Derek

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>W2k with 1.5Gb of ram does not 'rely' on virtual memory. Yes thanks, I know that. Not that I stated anything of the sort nor would I.If you read what I wrote in the context with which it was written you will see that that statement relates only to how Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 operates. Which is why I stated "For example...". I was illustrating a specific instance. I should have thought that was obvious.Perhaps if you worked a little harder on your reading comprehension skills instead trying to impress everyone with your supposedly superior computing knowledge you wouldn't find it necessary to author such erroneously superfluous posts.I don't mind being informed that I am in error, if and when I do so, but make sure you fully understand what's been written before contradicting someone. It really pisses me off when I'm accused of stating something I didn't.

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My experience suggests you only need one area on each drive for swap/page files. A small dedicated partition (I use 2048MB) at the extreme outer edge of each drive, will give the fastest possible data transfer the drive has to offer. If you have multiple operating systems, they are perfectly happy sharing that partition. I only run one OS at home, so I set my minimum and maximum swap file size the same, to eliminate the necessity of the OS having to "manage" the file size or location. Works great for me.

JW Titus - Busy fixing what's broke and breaking what's not.

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JW,A dedicated partition will not benefit anybody, it only adds to head movement, which is the slowest part of a disk drive.The best place for the swap (for a single drive) is next to the primary directory. That way the heads move the least.Derek

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How do you tell the HDD where you want the page file to be? Is this something done with the initial format?Also, I recently read somewhere that splitting your page file among the installed drives speeds performance. Any of you guys had any experience in setting things up this way?MC

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For Win98, right click My Computer > Properties > Performance > Virtual Memory. XP is a little different but same end result. It is my understanding that once the operating system is loaded, it runs from RAM--not from the hard drive. The same is true for the primary software. Then it is the exchange of files to and from virtual memory which feed the ongoing processing. The linear velocity at the outer edge of the drive is considerably faster than that farther in, so data transfer is much faster. The best option is to have a second drive in play, which would house the swap file so that head movement is minimized. This would only apply where the drives are equal in rotational velocity, seek time, etc. In other words, matched drives. Of course, SCSI drives are considerably faster than IDE, but with some of the newer Ultra ATA systems now available, you can get significantly better data transfer rates from IDE. Of course, the best option is to spring for a brand new system with 2+Gig CPU and premium video card, etc. Unfortunately, we don't all have that kind of loose change. To get unbiased opinion, use Google to search for "cache"+"swap file" or "tweak"+"". You don't have to overclock your machine to get better performance. Keep in mind that Win98 was designed to run on a small amount of RAM, because RAM was so expensive then. Now that RAM is cheap, take advantage of the possibility to enhance the system's ability to make use of it. As I said earlier, I have 1024MB RAM and I've set my swap file to 2048MB (mininum and maximum). I have not had one problem over the last six months I've run it that way; as much as 16 hours at a stretch. If I were to switch to XP, I would have to upgrade the entire system to be able to match my present performance results.

JW Titus - Busy fixing what's broke and breaking what's not.

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>It is my understanding that once the operating system is loaded, it runs from RAM--not from the hard drive. The same
>is true for the primary software.Yes, as long as you have enough memory.>Then it is the exchange of files to and from virtual memory which feed the ongoing processing.There is no exchange of files.>The linear velocity at the outer edge of the drive is considerably faster than that farther in, so data
>transfer is much faster.You are making an assumption that the number of sectors if different.>The best option is to have a second drive in play, which would house the swap file so
>that head movement is minimized.What head movement, the swap is on its own drive.>This would only apply where the drives are equal in rotational velocity, seek time, etc.Absolutely nothing to do with anything here.>In other words, matched drives. Of course, SCSI drives are considerably faster than IDE,You are not keeping up, IDE and scsi are the same speed now.>but with some of the newer Ultra ATA systems now available, you can get significantly better data transfer rates from IDE.You seem a bit confused??>As I said earlier, I have 1024MB RAM and I've set my swap file to 2048MB (mininum and maximum). I have not had one problem over the last six
>months I've run it that way; as much as 16 hours at a stretch. If I were to switch to XP, I would have to
>upgrade the entire system to be able to match my present performance results. I have 512Mb if ram with a 524Mb swap and I have had no problems either. The setting proves nothing except that it works, just like mine.Derek

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>I have 512Mb if ram with a 524Mb swap and I have had no
>problems either. The setting proves nothing except that it
>works, just like mine. Well put...Just because your system appears to be functioning properly doesn't make it correct.-Jeff

Union Pacific is my drug.

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