RAM disk/RAM drive

I came across an old thread by giles called Ram Disk from 31 October 2003, now closed so I can't reply to it. He reported being very happy with a RAMdisk app from Arsoft Online, but their site says they no longer support it and I couldn't find even an unsupported download there.

I remember back in my early DOS days using RAMdrive as a very successful way to speed up a PC by putting temp files on it - is that the same concept with a different name? The October 2003 thread even reports good results with putting the browser cache there, and Steve R Jones even suggested putting the pagefile there (but with a warning about occasional instability).

I've found ramdisk.sys (and -.PNF and -.inf) on my system, but my understanding is that XP doesn't use autoexec.bat, so I don't know how to deploy ramdisk, even if it is the same concept.

I'm using XP SP2 with 5MB physical memory and 2 GB virtual memory (whatever that is! ), and I could really use some more speed. Can I speed things up with ramdisk? And, if so, then how?

 

Thanks, Steve - I've downloaded it and shall try it out later (it's midnight and my eyes are going square from playing on WindowsBBS, Wikipedia and Google all day!).

 

Played with it today. Looks as though it's set up OK, appears on Control Panel. I followed giles' instructions in that old thread, too:

"(Set your own disk drive letter) (I set it to R: )
Automatic
Emulate a local hard disk
(Set your own disk size) (I set it to 90 MB)
512
32
2
Enable RAM Disk
(Leave the rest of "File System" alone) "

And I checked that drive R: is visible in Tweak-UI. And I closed and re-started a couple of times. But I still can't find the darn drive anywhere...

 

[several reboots later...]

Thanks, Steve - that fixed it!