Subj : Re: Supermium
To   : August Abolins
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Thu Sep 25 2025 10:00:00

AUGUST ABOLINS wrote:
> Hello Ky.Moffet!
> 
>> There's a flag to make XP use 8GB, and there have been successful shims
>> up to 128GB, same as XP64. I have not tried it; instead I wound up
>> migrating to XP64.
> 
>> Manual patching and caveats:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsxp/comments/1dhtxpd/confused_about_pae_patch
>> _for_using_full_ram_on/
> 
> 
> Wow.  Not gonna play with that.  Can't afford to muck up my XP
> machine.

Yeah, if you depend on it... no experiments.

> 
>> How much physical RAM do you have?
> 
> 3GB.  I think I *did* have 4GB at one point, but I swapped one
> of the existing 2GB modules to go into another XP machine
> several years ago.  Now the Thinkpad T60 is 2GB + 1GB.

I just checked, the T60 maxes out at 4GB. It was a very early Core2Duo, 
didn't have the chipset for more RAM support (later systems handled 
8GB). Another GB would help by giving you back what's now hardware 
reserve, but it's PC2 which can be hard to come by.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd008795-detailed-specifications-thinkpad-t60-t60p

>> An interesting comment seen somewhere:
> 
>> What you can do (and what I usually do) is use the Gavotte
>> ramdisk trick. Gavotte ramdisk can create a ramdisk out of
>> the remainder of the 8GB of installed RAM. You then tell
>> Windows to use the ramdisk for your pagefile and, performance
>> wise, it's a lot like having 8GB of RAM available
> 
> I recall using ramdisks and high-mem on my early 286 and 386
> machines. I used them as temp work spaces.  Luv'd it.

I had a 2mb RAM card in my 286 (which had 1MB on the system board, tho 
not entirely usable -- some bad chips were locked out). The system 
couldn't see the RAM card, but the RAMdisk driver did, and it was really 
handy as fast workspace.

> But it might be worth revisiting the matter and drop another
> 2GB module in it, and try the ramdisk tool you mentioned.

Maxes out at 4GB total, but I still think it would be worth doing, if 
you can find the RAM cheaply.

> I try to limit too many tabs and progs open at any time. But
> sometimes, even the core progs that I need all open at the same
> time: MS Access, Excel, the browser, and an email program - can
> trigger a low mem warning - but rarely.  When I investigate the
> processes list, it's usually a rogue process from another
> action that hasn't closed.

Yeah. XP itself is fairly lean -- with no third party drivers it needs 
only 80MB of RAM!  start installing drivers and that goes up fast.
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