Ram Disk Configurations

Ram Disk Utility is often used to decompress large amount of data. The operation is done within the actual physical RAM you have in your system.

Temporal Data that is created by applications are often written on the Hard disk.
For example, Open Office.

The temporal data will be also created if you ''Run'' the program from the internet browser instead of downloading it to a specific location you specify and run it later.

Buffering data is also stored. Such data is stored by YouTube video for example.

All Temporary Data are stored on the hard disk.

By using Ram Disk Utility correctly, you can store those temporary data in the actual Ram instead of hard drive.

Because RAM (Random Access Memory) reads and write faster than the Hard drive, all temporary data is written faster on RAM thus the applications that requires the temporary data to be stored in the system runs faster.

Ram Disk utility reserves the amount of RAM space you specified when you configured the utility. Then, the space you specified is formatted to FAT32. It can be any other format but the one i have given to you use FAT32.



My system has 4Gb of Rams, mixed 2Gb of PC2-8500 and 2Gb of PC2-6400 Rams all from GEIL BlackDragon. The speed difference is not a problem here since Dell E521 can not handle PC2 8500 at full speed. Instead, it reads them as PC2 6400.

If you look at the Task Manager above, you will quickly notice that the Total Available physical ram is around 3G.

Including the GPU ram, my total installed RAM amount is 4.5Gb.

By looking at the pic above, most people will probably think that the reason why it is 3Gb shown, is because of the 32bit OS.

But this doesn't mean that Windows 32bit do not use whole 4Gb or ram. It is been used actually.

If you install 3Gb of ram for example instead of 4Gb, you will quickly notice that the total amount of physical Ram is NOT 3Gb anymore. It is reduced to 2.5Gb instead. If you install 2Gb of rams, the total amount will reduce further more.

The last 1Gb of ram is not configured correctly by 32bit OS(because it is 32bit). It does not that it doesn't recognize.

This E521 came with the motherboard that is manufactured when XP was around. Logically speaking, they wouldn't make 4 Ram slots on the motherboard if 4Gb of ram do not work with windows XP 32bit.

All other softwares(that is designed for windows) uses the features of Windows OS that we, the users can not access easily. Using other softwares to determine if the 32bit OS uses full 4Gb of ram or not can not be decided and it is not 100% sure.



Alright, for a moment, let's say that the remaining 1Gb is not been used by 32bit windows OS.

Now, people will shout out to use RamDisk Utility to use the remaining 1Gb that apparently 32Bit windows can't recognize properly.

If you look at the pic above again, you will notice that I have reserved 1Gb of Ram as RamDisk. The PF Usuage shows 1.50Gb.

Normally my XP uses around 500mb of ram only.

Out of 4Gb of ram, 1Gb of ram is converted into FAT32 and reserved.

This doesn't show that the remaining 1Gb is reserved correctly by the system.

The RAM is also shared with the graphic memory. I REALLY do not know what is going on here at the background exactly. The task manager and the other third party softwares do not show the true amount of RAM correctly.


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