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Do I still need to use virtual memory?
I have a windows 7 64 bit machine with 16GB. Memory usage will never reach anywhere near that. Therefore I don't see why Windows would need to use virtual memory. Is it OK to turn it off? To 'force' Windows to use RAM?
Tony_Henrich
Posted 2010-10-05T16:47:12.263
Reputation: 9 154
Microsoft guidance has been to keep Virtual Memory, even in the modern era of more RAM than you can shake a stick at. – SysAdmin1138 – 2010-10-05T17:15:16.670
The biggest (only, these days) reason to keep paging is for caching reasons. RAM is volatile and may be unstable (cached data can degrade over time, even working data in RAM disks can). For long-term caching (up to and over an hour), caching it to disk is much more reliable. – ssube – 2010-10-05T20:36:33.470
If data in your RAM is degrading, your entire machine will be unstable, and you need new RAM. In normal use, RAM should be as reliable or more reliable than a hard disk. (I've had more HDD failures than RAM failures personally). – davr – 2010-11-19T19:41:06.580