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Win7 64bit / 8 gig of RAM optimizing your PC for recording, I'm wondering what the best virtual memory settings should be? How do you set yours or do you even do this? I'm also interested how the mobile laptops do this with external drives attached?

I have 3 HD plus an OS:

C Drive OS

  1. D Audio
  2. E Sample
  3. F Sample
    all other drives I have Custom Size:
    Initial 6270
    Maximum 12270

    Again, I have 8 Gig of RAM
    Does this sound right?

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audiokid Mon, 04/18/2011 - 09:43

To JackAttack, I didn't realize they were similar, but this makes sense now. When setting up your drives and where to send your DAW files, do you also have your temp folder in another drive from your C drive?

To John Todd, have you followed the rules, what amount of RAM do you have? Did it just not make a difference or did your sessions stall etc when using it?

Ripeart Wed, 05/25/2011 - 00:13

Don't put the page file on any disk used to capture or playback audio. Multiply your ram by 1.5 and set both memory values to that number. That way when windows creates the page file it won't expand it, reducing the chance of fragmentation. Once the page file is created, run a full defrag on that drive.

You may also want to google up superfetch/readyboost and familiarize yourself with that technology. You could also experiment with putting the page file on a USB 3 connected flash drive, though you will have to trick windows into believing it's a fixed disk.

One other thing is that you could run with no page file, though it's not recommended or supported by msft -the option is available. I do it on all my heavy load SQL servers. YMMV.

Another little trick is to format your drives to a smaller block size. This helps access times (and disk space) in certain scenarios, one such scenario being streaming type data.

A final thought - if your running out of resources to the point where you need to toy with paging, you may want to think about upgrading your machine specs.