make windows 7x64 use more RAM

using windows 7 64-bit, i have 6 gigs of RAM installed and a lot of it goes completely unused. does anyone know how i can force windows to cache more or something so the majority of the RAM is in use all the time so things will open faster?
my hdd is a huge bottleneck for my system.

also correct me if im wrong and using more RAM for cache will only slow things down, please.

 

I have 6GB installed right now with W7 Ultimate 64-bit. Generally I'm only using 20% of it and I'm having no problems whatsoever running multiple programs as once. Everything loads faster than I can blink. What kind of CPU do you have? Is your RAM DDR3?

I don't really know of any way to manually cache other than running a lot of programs. I know programs are cached only as you use them. What you want to do is sort of complicated and I'm not sure if it can be done manually in Windows (I think in Linux you can but again, not sure). The system only uses as much RAM as it needs to. Maybe your problem is in the controllers on your HDD? You say it's a bottleneck...If the controllers don't work right they can slow down the system. Then again, if your RAM is significantly slower than your CPU your problem lies there.

 

Windows 7 does have a feature known as prefetch that fetches commonly used programs and places them in RAM. However this is only for commonly used programs. Windows does not, as far as I know, allow adjustment of the prefetch options by default.

Programs are also not much good in RAM if you do not use them as they just take up space that could be used by other programs that need it. However, with 6GB of RAM this is unlikely.

My only suggestion at this stage is to "teach" prefetch to fetch all programs by:

1. Shutting down your computer
2. Turning it back on - do not use restart in windows
3. Open all the programs you want in RAM at once
4. Wait for them all to load
5. Close them all
6. Repeat 5 or 6 times from step 1.

This should "teach" prefetch to load all the programs you want into RAM as you use them consistently. Make sure you use them all every boot though or prefetch may remove them from it's list. This may also slow down your boot time as well as all the programs are loaded into RAM from the hard drive.

 

thanks for the advice but i was hoping for something that would either keep programs in RAM even after they are closed, or perhaps a better way to edit pre-fetch than to open and close programs repeatedly.
or even some kind of RAM manager that wont remove things until all 6 gigs are used up.

 

You would only be hurting yourself by loading the RAM up.
Other programs and applications would not have any to use when you tried to open them.

 

the bottleneck is most certainly the hdd, i dont remember the brand of the RAM, but i have a core i7 920 and the corresponding mobo and RAM it takes are not slow. the speed issue is my single 500gig wd caviar blue.

 

i was looking into the way windows manages the cache and in the resource monitor it is shown as "standby" which is freed as soon as a program needs RAM. using everest ultimate to monitor the RAM only shows what is used by applications and not the cache, so i assume this statement is true, that the cache will give up its space for other applications. and with RAM being RAM i dont think i would notice the system dumping the cache to allocate RAM to a program in need, it could certainly be rewritten to at a much faster speed than the hdd could ever be read from.

 

Then that's probably the issue. I have i7 920 too. My C drive is a 500GB, but I forgot which brand, it might be a Seagate. It's probably an issue with the controllers within your HDD, in which case you might want to invest in a better HDD. When I was looking at drives I made sure they had a high cache. I think my 500GB has a 64MB cache. Can you check to see what cache is on your current HDD? Also, it might be worth reading this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/understanding-hard-drive-performance,1557.html

You can also try setting up a RAID drive. That could possibly help you.

EDIT: just noticed our similar user names. I giggled a little

 

So turn off your virtual memory/swapfile (or limit it to 100MB min and max). Test it out over a few days and report back.

 

Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 16 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Load/unload Cycles 50,000 minimum
Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time 10.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)

i would really like to set up a raid but i need some more money first.

 

it already doesnt have a swap file, it still empties out the RAM. simply refuses to use all of it, usually there is about 2.5-1.5 gigs of it empty.

 

All the machines I have had or worked on always performed better when they had RAM to spare.
The more available, the better.

 

I think setting up RAID would be a solution but you need more than 1 HDD for it. RAID 0 needs 2 HDDs... RAID 1 is worthless to what you want, but also needs 2 hdds. But yeah....You might be able to find a good drive on Ebay. That's where I got both of mine. Snagged a 1TB for $60, brand new sealed, so you might be able to find a sweet deal like that. My 500GB I think it was $40, also off ebay, brand new and sealed. No problems whatsoever.

 

Do what I do. I basically have a 3GB disk cache. But this cache is really a ram disk that saves its contents on shutdown and reads back in its contents on start up. So ultimately I have a 3GB hot cache at start up. Meaning I have a 3GB HDD cache that is full at start up. 90% of all of my commonly used software (Firefox, winamp, pidgen...etc) are already cached into ram at startup along with a sizable chunk of windows itself. The only real cost is a 10 secound delay on boot as the ram disk is read from the HDD.

 

now that sounds like an excellent solution, how would i go about setting up something like that?

 

I use a utility called eBooster. The "pro" version that supports ram caching as I discribed is 40$. But im sure there are free ways of doing the same thing, though I'm not sure how. I already had eBooster for readyboost like caching in XP so I never tried setting it up manually.

 

thanks, ill give that a try

 

I really don't know what your after here spanktastic? W7 uses around 3GB out of 6 here and normally, without anything running on my i7 6GB machine.:confused It behaves very well and is fast!

 

In a perfectly optimized system you should be at 100% ram load all of the time. By 100% ram load I mean all of your ram is being used to store data or for programs, not just for what is running. Lets say you have 6 GB of ram and your OS and programs are using 3GB. In a perfect situation there should be 3GB of cached data in the remaining ram space. If more ram is needed for programs the cache is dynamically dumped to make more room (according to oldest cache hit). For example if 4GB of ram is needed for programs the cache space would shrink down to 2GB by deleting the oldest/least used data in the cache. It is odd at first to think of a constant 100% ram load. But this kind of caching is common, most of the time the ram space used for caching shows up as free ram so you can never see it happening. Though its normally not to the extent that its using all of your ram.

 

Seems to be easier to remove RAM sticks to get the balance desired.

 

this is exactly what i'm after

 

this wouldnt really help at all. sure it MIGHT start using all of the RAM in this situation, but there would still be less.