XP & Memory

[Jamieh]

Someone posted recently that Gigastudio 160 running under XP will recognize 1.5GB. (I had previously thought this limit was 1GB.) Does someone have Gigastudio running on XP with >1GB on it? I can upgrade to 1.5GB on my XP machine, but it will cost me about $250 because of the stupid way my computer\'s memory is set up (only 2 slots). I want to make sure it is going to be worth it before I shell out the bucks.

[§eth]

lots of people run giga on 1 gig of ram. It depends on how you record your tracks. Some do one at a time some do real time, but truely i read lots use 1 gig of RAM successfully. If I were you, I\'d use that 250 on a new board and memory. The New Asus P4C800 deluxe you can find for 150 on price grabber and memory is about 70-90 for 512 sticks of DDR 400 RAM. I just got it 2 weeks ago and it screams!!! you can read a review on that particular board in the Eastwest board on this site. If you do go the new board rout, make sure it has SATA drives for your hard drives as this is the new standard, you can still plug in your old drives fine. also helps to find one like the Asus or MSI boards that have built in GIGABIT LAN cards that transfer at insane speeds. ( Oh are you on Pentium or AMD? The board i suggested were for P4 and they support hyperthreading which tricks your computer into thinking it has 2 processors and makes multitasking lots easier!

[Jamieh]

Well I\'m already running 1GB and it works fine. However if I can throw another 512MB in there and load up more instruments I would like to. I just want to know if someone has put in MORE than 1GB in XP and gotten Gigastudio to use it.

[Scott Cairns]

Someone posted recently that Gigastudio 160 running under XP will recognize 1.5GB. (I had previously thought this limit was 1GB.) Does someone have Gigastudio running on XP with >1GB on it? I can upgrade to 1.5GB on my XP machine, but it will cost me about $250 because of the stupid way my computer\'s memory is set up (only 2 slots). I want to make sure it is going to be worth it before I shell out the bucks. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">- I think that was me. Over on the Nemesys site it states that fact.

I will say again though, just cause Giga only recognises a certain amount of ram, you will still benefit from putting more in. XP, and any other apps (your sequencer for example) need ram too.

[Jamieh]

Yeah, but I\'m not running a sequencer on the machine. Any to be honest, there are very very few apps that gain any benefit from having that much memory, unless you are running them all at the same time. The only thing I would get it for would be to upgrade Giga on that machine--I\'d just like to find out if anyone has been successful in getting Giga to use the extra memory.

[Ian Livingstone]

Jamieh,

I\'m running giga on 4 XP machines all with 1.5gb ram, and getting between 82% and 85% memory usage reported on each. They\'re all loaded up to the max - anything further and I get error 5\'s.

Quick maths calc:-
85% of 1.5gb = 1.275gb used by giga.

This suggests that it does let you use more than 1gb, but I guess it depends if the percentage reported is taking into account total system ram, or system ram left after running windows/giga itself. In which case it may be talking about eg 85% of 1.2gb....

Cheers,
Ian

[Oliver Vessey]

Jamieh,

Have you considered swapping XP for Win98SE?

I\'m running 1gB RAM under 98 and getting approx. 30% more instruments loaded than I used to under XP.

It doesn\'t matter to me that I\'m using an \'old\' OS as this is on a stand-alone PC running nothing except GS - but I know that Steinberg (for example) aren\'t supporting 98 any more, so anyone considering this should obviously check out whether any other applications & drivers will be happy...

Anyway, it\'s a cheap way of getting more usable memory - may not be suitable for everyone but it works for me.

images/icons/smile.gif

[Jamieh]

Thanks for the idea--I\'m already running a Win98 machine. I\'ve got Win98 running Cakewalk & Giga, and then I use my other XP machine (which I use for other things too) as a secondary Giga machine. I could have dual-booted it, but the system is already configured and I\'d have to rebuild my entire Giga drive since it is currently NTFS. Not worth the hassle.

I currently have 1GB in the XP Giga machine and I\'m able to load it up to 97% memory usage without any problems. Between the 1GB Win98 machine and the 1GB XP machine I can *ALMOST* load all the patches I want. I thought maybe if I boosted up to 1.5GB I could get them all in. But it sounds like it probably isn\'t worth the cash, at least right now. I can always just record in multiple passes since I record everything SMPTE time-aligned anyway.

Thanks for the ideas!

[Bill]

How much memory Giga can use under XP is not fixed, and may vary from system to system. It’s not a limitation of Giga, but rather that XP is reluctant to allocate more memory to a kernel level app (like Giga). Since the OS and the Giga application itself use memory, 1.5GB is always a good idea.

[Furst]

I have a couple of Dell 4550\'s with a gig of RAM on XP, and when I hit \"99%\" in Giga, Taskmanager shows only 543megs used by Giga (with about 200 more not used for anything) images/icons/frown.gif

So I would think going to 1.5gigs would be great... you might actually get to load a gig of samples. images/icons/rolleyes.gif

[composer22]

Originally posted by Furst:
[snip]
So I would think going to 1.5gigs would be great... you might actually get to load a gig of samples. images/icons/rolleyes.gif <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">You\'ll still hit the wall. My advice is to stick with win98SE. Wish I had after spending $ on 2 gig and xp.

3.0 breaking the 2 gig barrier? doubtful. there is no incentive for tascam. They can just force you to buy more keys, and so I think they will spend their $$$ on better copy protection imho

[composer22]

Originally posted by Bill:
How much memory Giga can use under XP is not fixed, and may vary from system to system. It’s not a limitation of Giga, but rather that XP is reluctant to allocate more memory to a kernel level app (like Giga). Since the OS and the Giga application itself use memory, 1.5GB is always a good idea. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">There is definately a way to allocate more memory to a kernel application in XP. Unfortunately, Tascam has not pursued this problem with vigor.

Read INSIDE WINDOWS 2000