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So I just upgraded to 8gb of ram from 4gb. Now I have all 4 slots populated x 2gb sticks. I got the same brand/sku as my previous sticks to avoid dicrepencies and everything seems to be working just fine, I'm on pass 3 of memtest86 v4 and no errors. Before running memtest I went in the bios and everything was set to auto as far as memory is concerned. Am I missing anything as far as testing/setup is concerned?

Anyhow now that I have 8gb of ram, should I change the size of my page file in w7? I have it set to max of 4gb I think, will this improve performance? The reason I upgraded in the first place was because I maxed out my ram a few times browsing the web, listening to media, playing games, all at the same time. I read somewhere that if Im not utilizing all my ram I could decrease the page file. I can't see myself maxing out all 8gb of ram anytime soon.

My computer specs are below pre upgrade.

Skullzer wrote:

So I just upgraded to 8gb of ram from 4gb. Now I have all 4 slots populated x 2gb sticks. I got the same brand/sku as my previous sticks to avoid dicrepencies and everything seems to be working just fine, I'm on pass 3 of memtest86 v4 and no errors. Before running memtest I went in the bios and everything was set to auto as far as memory is concerned. Am I missing anything as far as testing/setup is concerned?

No, this sounds all good. These days there's very little to be gained from tweaking the memory settings unless you're wringing the last drops of performance out a heroic overclock.

Anyhow now that I have 8gb of ram, should I change the size of my page file in w7? I have it set to max of 4gb I think, will this improve performance? The reason I upgraded in the first place was because I maxed out my ram a few times browsing the web, listening to media, playing games, all at the same time. I read somewhere that if Im not utilizing all my ram I could decrease the page file. I can't see myself maxing out all 8gb of ram anytime soon.

Unless you're short on space on that drive, just leave it alone. The pagefile is already proportionately smaller (it's now 33% of your total virtual memory, vs 50% before). You probably don't need a 4GB file, and you certainly could shrink it, but it won't gain you any performance. You'll find a lot of dumb statements out there about the pagefile, and people obsess over it -- usually because they don't understand it. Even when it's in use, it's not on the critical path for performance unless you're in an overcommitted situation (ie you're actually using all your RAM).

The pagefile is basically used when you run out of available RAM. Now that you've doubled the amount you have, I'd say you are in pretty good shape to just leave the pagefile set to auto. The only reason to make it as large as the amount of RAM you have is in the event your computer has a blue screen of death and is set to create a .dmp file. It will take all data that is currently in memory and 'dump' it to the pagefile. Taken directly from Microsoft: "If you select the Complete memory dump option, you must have a paging file on the boot volume that is sufficient to hold all the physical RAM plus 1 megabyte (MB)."

So... unless you expect to have lots of problems with your system, just set it to auto. And unless you are running a bunch of VM's, you likely won't even use it.

VinnyC wrote:

The pagefile is basically used when you run out of available RAM.

This is not exactly accurate, the pagefile will be used even if you are not using up all the RAM.