Anyone running 8886 w/o Virtual Memory?

I do that with my desktops (1GB ram), and do notice an increase in performance since the slow page file access is no longer a bottleneck.
I plan to do that on my sager. It should be able to handle it, unless you use programs that are memory intensive (3d animation, Professional video editing, pshop with huge files...) Otherwise it should handle everything.
One thing i should mention, i use photoshop with no page file, when it starts up it warns me about the page file, i click continue and work on it... never had a problem....

It really depends on what you normally do with your computer and how often you reboot. If you normally only run one or two apps at a time, closing them as you finish, you can get by with it.

Windows, like most modern operating systems, cache files up in memory in order to try to speed operations up. The more you run and the more files you open and close, the more Windows tries to help you by caching files in memory.

For example, the laptops we use at work are used for sales demonstrations. They have Oracle running, IIS running, BEA's Weblogic App server running and a couple of our Applications. Even with 1GB of ram, they need at least a 2GB static paging file or things grind to a halt and something will crash. Again, it all depends on what you will be doing on the machine. You can always try it and put the paging file back if you have problems.

If you do end up using a paging file, always make it a static size that is somewhere between 1X to 2X the size of your ram after you fully defrag your hard drive partition where it will reside. This will make sure the file is contiguous, therefore it will access faster, plus a static sized file will eliminate the constant thrashing of the disk as Windows sizes the paging file up and down, depending on what is going on. Just changing the paging file to a static size sometimes will speed things up.

Good luck!

Martin Parrott

I agree with Dragon's reply. I forgot to mention that on systems where i do need to have a page file, i usually reserve a separate partition with a fixed size paging file size (for all of the reasons dragon mentioned before)

On the 8886 I have, I created a static page file on the hard drive where windows is NOT, lol. I made it 2.5 times the memory size... which is the recommendation by windows. I agree with all that was said, and I will try using the computer without a page file, but I'd like to wait until the game reviewage is over so that way all of the tests are on the same settings, lol. The thing about ram is that some programs in windows use it once you run them and when you exit them, they stay memory resident. Media Player is one of them. If you get a program like Memturbo, then it will clear out your ram and take those things out. What I might do (and what I might recommend), is if you use no page file, have memturbo running in the background and have it set to clear your memory automatically when it gets near the 1 gig max, because if it hits 1 gig and you have no page file... I imagine something bad will happen :-) I will do this as a test soon... Expect it in the review section :-)

I've never had problems with my computer running out of memory either virtual of physical ( i run no page file ) even when using 3d animation software which is very memory intensive.