Fun With RAM Disk

Posted by: Viper  //  Category: Computer

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.

9 Responses to “Fun With RAM Disk”

  1. Coop Says:

    Just my 2 cents but I like the other website template better.

  2. Viper Says:

    When I picked the other one I wanted a very simplistic feel. It was, but I found that I got tired of it pretty quickly. I don’t know that this is one I’ll keep for a long time, but it’s something new.

  3. mom Says:

    I liked the other one better too.

  4. Fading Existence Says:

    It might help to take compress the amount of empty space at the top and to center your tagline…

  5. mom Says:

    Can you say that again and make sense? I think you meant to condense or compress the empty space at the top and center the tag line. Am I right?

  6. zBlackX Says:

    I like this this template.

    I wander what this says about how my mind works.

    A (aka D)

  7. Viper Says:

    It’s interesting how everybody is posting about the theme of the site and nobody has anything to say about the content of the post. The implications of being able to use something as fast as RAM as storage not just the work area for the processor is huge. In the not to distant future I see the computers transitioning from the hard drive as we know it to some form of RAM type storage. We just have to wait and see if that looks like solid state drives, or if they go with a RAM disk approach similar to what I was doing.

  8. mom Says:

    I don’t know Ken but we will have to wait to see.

  9. mom Says:

    Oh I should have put this in that post to. I will never have a big enough computer either. We want to make a computer that plays old games like Doom.

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