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Now that I have 12 gigs of ram in my PC I'd like to make the most of it and minimize the disk access of the application/game I'm using while I use it so I'm wondering if there are some ways to preload as much of an application that can fit into ram when it's started.

I tried making a ramdrive, but it got tiresome copying the files back and forth and making the ntfs junctions every time. Also it seems that not every program can follow the junctions :S

I'd also like to do this for video files, specially large hd movies. It seems that every media player I've tried only loads the parts of the file already watched into ram + a few seconds. It makes for really choppy fast forwarding.

Anyone here done something like this?

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  • It sounds like you are trying to solve the problem the wrong way. "My hard drive is slow" -> make it faster. Jul 16, 2011 at 4:14

3 Answers 3

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Try making shortcuts to the apps in the all users startup folder. Then right-click, properties, start minimized.

This works for me, but I run normal business/network admin programs -- nothing media related. The location is:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
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  • Chrome does not start minimized on Windows 8.1 even if the option is selected in the shortcut. Feb 26, 2015 at 17:17
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It is a strange coincidence that just 5 years ago, having 2GB of memory was the norm. Now it isn't uncommon to run into people carrying 4GB of RAM on their laptops. . .

That being said, not that many programs are designed to run with that much memory available. Even if you threw 12GB at them, they'd have no idea what to do with it. Few programmers design their programs with the specification of "Given 12GB of memory, load UBER array!" Your search and sort algorithms have to be tweaked. New bugs are introduced. Something that was efficient for 100MB isn't always going to scale up. etc etc.

Simply saying, few programs would know what to do if given that much memory. That said, you can do a couple of things. For video, try to cut down on the amount of buffering they do. A coworker of mine padded his buffer on WMP to 10 seconds and wonders why it takes so long to load up. I'm thinking "Well, you DID tell it to load up an extra ten seconds of video." More powerful machines can get away with a much much smaller buffer since RAM and CPU is a plenty and the likelyhood of I/O bottlenecks are low.

And considering people still constantly demand programs use less and less resources, I have a hard time seeing this changing anytime soon in the consumer space. Customers regularly ask "why is my CPU spiking to 60%?" or "why is program X using 500MB!?" I just don't see too many programmers deciding to error on the side of large RAM usage. . .

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No haven't done what your saying; I've messed around with memory caching though; usually done through the programs' exe (for games) as this dictates to the system/CPU what it needs and how important it is; done this for MSFS ACOF (FS9) for example.

Ram is always being used by the system (Windows) even needlessly it just likes to and requires using all the avail ram all the time; When you run a Graphics intensive game; your system operates according to it's perameters within it's limits.

Graphics cards nowaday are starting to do more brain work wich helps free up CPU and Ram resources making your system more efficient; the system then uses it's avial processing ability to feed the ram read your drives and network along with all the background crap........ and keep the graphics cards working.

Basically don't try to force feed your RAM, Windows does well enough; just make sure you don't have any bottlenecks in the system and see if you can free up resources from background progs and possibly edit your exe's; you can also do ALOT with Tweaking; I tweak all my systems even word processors!

Hope that helps!

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