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I'd like to configure Windows (XP actually, but knowing how to do this with 7 can once come in handy as well):

  1. Use large (several hundreds megabytes) amount of RAM for disk i/o cache
  2. Use large interval between committing writing cache to disk (because I've got huge RAM and very reliable system)

How to do this? I've found these options in O&O CleverCache, but I don't need any of its advanced features - only these two.

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This is interesting, i have never seen something like CleverCache before. Then again, do you think this will improve performance by a noticeable level? Disk random read performance is the thing that causes most slowdowns and this wont help that one bit. On the other hand, Writing to disk works like this: RAM -> DMA mem controller -> HDD. What you are trying to do is RAM -> Cache on RAM -> DMA mem controller -> HDD which is kinda counter-intuitive – aCuria Mar 6 '11 at 4:15
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Do not do this. As stated by aCuria, this is counterintuitive and can lead to corrupted data especially when some of these programs do not handle pointers and address memory properly. In the case of these RAM cashing programs, you end up creating a pointer to a pointer and ultimately end up with memory leaks.

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This (caching of read and write operations) is always done and "a pointer to a pointer", as you say, is always there. I just want the system to dedicate more RAM for this. As experience shows, this decreases initial reads speed (as more data is actually read from HDD than requested by an application) slightly but notably bud increases speed of repeated reads and following sequential reads (affects me because I use to work with long files and keep my drive defragmented), – Ivan Mar 6 '11 at 21:14
decreases resulting fragmentation (as bigger chunks are commited to HDD, and more frequently the changes age effectively final) and prolongs the drive life (as it is bothered less frequently) – Ivan Mar 6 '11 at 21:15
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