Tips N Tweaks 2

For this installment, lets talk about another easy (and cheap) method of getting the most out of your CPS or any other computer for that matter.  What I am referring to ties in with the last articles where I mentioned Virtual Memory.  Virtual Memory or just VM is a portion of the hard drive that is dedicated to acting as a temporary storage of data, device drivers and so on like RAM.  And performing two simple tasks with VM can drastically improve system performance as well as speed up the boot up process. 

VM was used heavily in older computers because the amount of RAM that could installed in a system was much more limited than it is now.  By default, whenever you install most operating systems such as Windows, the VM is placed on the primary boot sector or the drive that is used to start up your computer.  Without getting into the really technical stuff, just realize that this standard installation actually slows your computer down when it is booting up!

So the first tip of this article is to place the VM on another drive or preferably on another drive in it’s own partition.  This speeds up the boot process by eliminating the need for the OS to have to skip over back and forth to load the operating system, device drivers, etc.

The bonus tip for this article is that once VM sits happily in its own partition, adjust the minimum and maximum allocations to the following formulas:

Minimum VM = RAM x 1.5

Maximum VM = RAM x 2.5

For example, if your computer has 1GB or 1,024MB of RAM installed, the minimum VM should be set to 1,536MB.  The maximum would then be set to 2,560MB.

To learn more about Virtual Memory, RAM and partitions, I highly recommend reading my book Introduction to Computer DJing & CPS.

Tags: computer dj, cps, digital dj, hard drive, introduction to computer djing and cps, laptop dj, partition, ram, virtual memory

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 20:09 and is filed under Computer DJing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.