I played around with installing games to ram today. Unfortunately, since I only have 4GB of system memory, I was somewhat limited on which games I could install to it.
I installed Half-Life from cd first. It didn’t work. I found out that the unupdated non-steam version of Half-Life does not get along with Windows XP 64. It can’t recognize the way Windows handles the memory. The error I got kept telling me Half-Life requires at least 16MB of ram. Next I installed steam to RAM and ran Half-Life through that. This time the game launched, and I do mean launched. It was up in mere seconds. The load times were amazing. I hit a loading screen while running down a hallway on my way to get the HEV suit. It looked like the game just stuttered for a quarter second. The only other indication was the text “Loading” that was barely there long enough to notice. The first computer I played this game on took roughly a full minute to load a new area.
I wanted to test with Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, or Portal, but they all require much more space than I can provide in RAM. With another 4GB of RAM I could make a 6GB RAM disk and that wouldn’t have been a problem. It turns out that no matter how much computer I have I will always want more.