[lockecole]

I recently upgraded my iBook 466 with a 256 meg chip, turned off Virtual Memory, and planted a 64 meg RAM disk. Now the OS is taking up 120 megs of RAM and crashing while running IE and Appleworks at the same time. I figured I would have no problem running the two with so much ram.... but it appears that the OS is eating at the memory so much that it can't handle 2 programs at the same time.

Any suggestions would be grateful.

Locke

[noliv]

perhaps the 64 mb of the ram disk are included into 120 mb that are said to be taken by the system (I cant verify now, I'm on a peecee...)

Why does it crash ? I don't know...
do you really need the ram disk?

noliv

[WDL]

VM should be ON with the more recent operating systems according to Apple, Charles Downs,
David Pogue and many others - however, there is still a large number who denigrate it.

Mine's on, on all three of my Macs and set 50% higher than recommended - everything is smooth
and fast and I never have any crashes.

Try it and decide for yourself.

Don't know what the naysayers will do when they go to OS X where it HAS to be ON.

The only reason I use a RAM Disk is for the cache from my browser - speed it up and less wear and tear on the hard drive. Mine's set for 5 megs. What's on your RAM Disk? Why is it set so large? If there's nothing on it, cut it down in size or even get rid of it.

WDL

[This message has been edited by WDL (edited 01-08-2001).]

I'm running Final Cut and AppleWorks and 8 megs for the browser cache through the RamDisk. Probably not AppleWorks for very long though.....

Interesting idea about the OS including the RAM disk in its total memory. Not sure though - I should still have 50 megs of ram free for all applications when when running IE and Appleworks (gets up to 200 megs of ram). It said it was a memory error (type 2)..

Blah. I do see some system improvements w/o VM, so I dunno. Maybe I'll just keep the RamDisk lower.

Error type 2 is "out of memory" where either a) the program has physically run out of ram... or b) The programs memory has breached another programs memory, either of these will produce type 1, 2 and 3 errors. Disableing the ramdisk would be the best advice, i cant possibly see why, even with the applicantions you are running, a ram disk is all that nessesary. 256mb is more then enough. And also, when Virtual memory is off (or even on for that matter) The more ram you have, the more memory the OS will occupy for itself. You will see little or no speed decrease when running the computer with Virtual memory on, and you will find that the ram disk, is no longer all that important.