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I have a PC with Windows 7 Ultimate (64Bit) with 24 GB of ram and Intel i7 X980 (6 Cores).

I would like to know, what are best settings/tweaks I should have for faster performance and efficient memory and CPU usage.

Most of my settings are defaults etc.

Currently it's only using around 8 GB. Seems like 24 GB is going wasted.

I mostly use it for some photo editing, programming,streaming videos, movies and occasional video game play sometimes.

I have 4 partitions

I tweaked the Virtual memory to No Page file for all partition except C.

Please advise.

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A computer with those specifications should have very little difficulty completing most tasks. Optimising general performance in this case is likely not possible. If you have a particular performance problem you should include that in your question. – ta.speot.is Oct 29 '12 at 8:54

closed as not constructive by Indrek, ta.speot.is, Diogo, techie007, ChrisF Oct 29 '12 at 12:08

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Most of my settings are defaults etc.

Typically the default settings on an operating system are fine. The people who set the defaults have a fairly good understanding of what a setting should be configured as.

Beyond that, make sure that the other components of your computer can keep up with your CPU and RAM. If you've got a 40GB IDE HDD, it might be time to upgrade that.

Currently it's only using around 8 GB. Seems like 24 GB is going wasted it seems.

Windows 7 Home Basic has a memory limit of 8 GB, but you say you're running Ultimate.

Complaining that Windows doesn't use all of your RAM is kind of like complaining that your car doesn't use all of its fuel on the trip to the local shops. If it doesn't need to be used, why should it?

Consider a computer with an infinite amount of RAM. Why would Windows use all that RAM? What would you expect to be in there?

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"Consider a computer with an infinite amount of RAM. Why would Windows use all that RAM? What would you expect to be in there?" The contents of the entire hard drive (or drives), cached for fast access. – Indrek Oct 29 '12 at 9:04
@Indrek Perhaps my point wasn't clear -- there's more RAM than Windows needs. You'd need hard drives with infinite capacity to fill the RAM. – ta.speot.is Oct 29 '12 at 9:28
In a hypothetical world where infinite RAM exists, why wouldn't infinitely large hard drives exist? And why wouldn't said infinite RAM be used for caching the contents of those hard drives? Same applies to any finite amount of RAM - if it's there and it's more than the OS needs, why shouldn't it be used for caching data? Your car and fuel analogy is fallacious because RAM isn't a consumable and there's no downside to using as much of it as possible. Unused fuel is saved fuel, but unused RAM is wasted RAM. – Indrek Oct 29 '12 at 9:38
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Well, Windows 7 ultimate manage that hardware with no problems (do not use home versions)!

You'll never use 24GB ram (except for professional rendering or sql server or ...)! Page files are pretty useless because you'll never use them for a real purpose.

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