1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.

RAM

Discussion in 'Technology Advice' started by Jim, Feb 23, 2019.

  1. Jim
    Offline

    Jim Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    I was having problems with my desktop, slow, kept crashing, blue screen. Took it to a repair shop, he couldn't find anything wrong with it but charged me 5oo pesos for his trouble.

    Took the thing to another shop and he kept it for 3 days and he discovered one of the memory cards had failed,
    was supposed to be 4 gig and was only running on 2 gig. So put 8 gig of RAM in total and it's like a brand new computer. :)
    • Like Like x 1
    • Agree Agree x 1
  2. graham59
    Offline

    graham59 Banned

    Brings to mind Viagra, for some reason. ;)
  3. Dave_E
    Offline

    Dave_E Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    Would that be the "500 pesos", or the "three days"?
    :eek:
    • Funny Funny x 1
  4. oss
    Offline

    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    The machine would not function at all with a dead DIMM for the explanation of the second shop to make any sense it must have had 4GB as 2 x 2GB DIMMS one of which had unmapped bad addresses, the crashes would be random depending on what you were doing as it would be the attempt to read or write to the bad address, that was causing the Blue Screen (BSoD).

    The extra RAM will allow the PC to page less, paging is where the OS needs more RAM than is physically available in the machine and it pages (maps) some of the data in RAM to a physical file on the hard drive, all operating systems do this all the time even when there is not that much pressure on real physical memory they will still page out minimised or background programs and then read them back from disk when the user brings the program back to the foreground, that read process is thousands of times slower than reading from physical RAM even when the disk is an SSD although an SSD will be a huge improvement.

    The more RAM you have the less paging the operating system will do but it will still do some paging, the normal recommendation for the pagefile size in the old days was 2.5 times the available RAM although these days it is best to let the Operating System manage this automatically.

    When you get up to 16GB or 32GB you can start to take a chance on having no swap file as the OS will likely never be under pressure to find areas of memory where it can move stuff around, but even then it is best to let the OS manage the swap file.

    This is the machine I am typing on just now, the commit charge is still larger than the RAM in use and the total at 17.5GB is bigger then than the 16GB physical RAM that I have in this laptop and you can see that in the size of the pagefile.sys file detailed below it is about 1.8GB (in bytes) which is really about 1.5GB when using powers of 1024.

    When I am working I can easily use all of the RAM on this box and the pagefile will grow, I have tried running without a pagefile at all and this machine would still eventually crash in some circumstances.

    upload_2019-2-23_12-59-25.png

    upload_2019-2-23_13-1-52.png

    Oh and before anyone thinks I am infected with something, InjectintoProcess.crash is madshi's file which is used by a debugging tool that I link into my Delphi applications :)
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2019
    • Like Like x 1
  5. graham59
    Offline

    graham59 Banned

    I thought that doubling my desktop's RAM from 16 to 32mb was pretty impressive back in 1998 .... along with the huge 2 gig hard drive, upgraded from the 1.1. :D
    Later balikbayaned it to the Phils.
    • Like Like x 2

Share This Page