[Closed] Disabling RAM in W7

I can't really answer the reducing RAM bit, but I doubt it. How much is a silly amount? I've got 16gigs in my work laptop and that resumes/hibernates pretty instantly...there is a ssd in there though.

I've got 32Gb, but if you think it resumes from hibernate instantly then you must be getting sleep confused with hibernate.

SSDs are only faster for lots of small files like your OS. Actual data transfer from SSD is slower than a normal HD.

I should google more before posting on here. There's an option in msconfig to do it, but I don't seem to be able to register two boot configurations for the same OS which would make it more convenient.

Are you running 32 or 64bit W7? IIRC only 64bit can address RAM greater than 4Gb (i think its actually 3.?Gb), so anything greater then 4Gb in a 32bit machine is totally wasted.

Are you running 32 or 64bit W7? IIRC only 64bit can address RAM greater than 4Gb (i think its actually 3.?Gb), so anything greater then 4Gb in a 32bit machine is totally wasted.

You do remember correct. That is true.

Can't see RAM affecting hibernate that much either....?

I've got 32Gb, but if you think it resumes from hibernate instantly then you must be getting sleep confused with hibernate.

I'm not, it's hibernating. Have you tried setting a limit on the size of the hibernate file? I can't remember what Windows does when you're using more RAM than the size of the hibernate file and you hibernate though.

I have a SSD due to working primarily on VM's, for that it's a helluva difference!

64 bit.

Can't see RAM affecting hibernate that much either....?

Well when hibernating, it writes the entire physical RAM to disk. So more RAM = longer to hibernate. It's not possible to write 16Gb of RAM to disk instantly, no matter what drive you have.

If you are using SSD then it may be that you press the button, the screen goes dark so you close the lid whilst it is still hibernating. This would not be a problem with SSD. However it won't restore from hibernate instantly.

The switch didn't work anyway, I set it to 8Gb and it bluescreened.

just turn the screen off?

molgrips - Member

64 bit.

Can't see RAM affecting hibernate that much either....?

Well when hibernating, it writes the entire physical RAM to disk. So more RAM = longer to hibernate. It's not possible to write 16Gb of RAM to disk instantly, no matter what drive you have.

If you are using SSD then it may be that you press the button, the screen goes dark so you close the lid whilst it is still hibernating. This would not be a problem with SSD. However it won't restore from hibernate instantly.

The switch didn't work anyway, I set it to 8Gb and it bluescreened.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/66482-memory-set-maximum-amount-used-windows-7-a.html

It might just set that switch you already tried though.

Also you could enable hybrid sleep in W7. Sleeps and resumes like normal sleep, but if the power is cut, it resumes as if it had hibernated. Works very well, I use it everyday on my XBMC box.

If it were up to me, I'd use sleep mode all the time. However my company requires that I use PGP, and this doesn't work unless the computer is actually off so I am obliged to either shut down or hibernate when I'm not with the machine.

Well when hibernating, it writes the entire physical RAM to disk. So more RAM = longer to hibernate. It's not possible to write 16Gb of RAM to disk instantly, no matter what drive you have.

It only writes the portion of RAM that's actually in use. Can you try close a few things before hibernating and see if that helps?

It only writes the portion of RAM that's actually in use.

Sure about that? I don't think it does. I've only got about 5Gb in use.

Pretty sure. My hiberfil.sys is also only 12 gig not 16. If you're not going to use to most of the ram it might be worth just taking out the surplus anyway? Might be the easiest way!

Hibernate seems to work really badly on my Win32 machine as well - takes longer to hibernate than it does to shut down and reboot.

Why are you hibernating? Why not just use sleep (it then hibernates after some pre-configured time if you've not used it again) or shut down?

As said, Hybrid Sleep is the way to go when you've got lots of RAM, and is how OSX does it by default too.

Goes to sleep as with a normal sleep mode but writes active memory to disk. Stays in a low power "sleep" mode so it can resume near-instantly, but if the power fails and it boots from cold, it behaves much a resume after hibernate, reading memory back from disk.

SSD read and write for large files should still be quite a bit faster (as long as you're not talking about the cheapo SSDs) than a regular hard disk, although not quite the vast performance chasm as when it comes to smaller and random stuff.

Hibernation files tend to get pretty fragmented anyway (especially with lots of RAM) so are arguably not that sequential anyway.

Why does it matter how long it takes to write the Hibernate file? Close lid, stash laptop in bag; it can sit there churning to disk for 15 minutes for what difference it makes, no? Resume, sure, you want that to be snappy.

Anyway. Are you sure it's the amount of RAM which is the issue? It should only have to write what's active; ie, just because a system has 16Gb doesn't mean it's got to commit 16Gb to disk, the actual amount will be smaller. It may well be something else failing - some driver or your AV perhaps - which is is slowing things down. I'd have a look to see if there's any BIOS / driver updates available for your system.

I've never done it so don't know the procedure, but I believe it's possible to trace and log hibernations. Might be worth investigating that route further perhaps?

My hiberfil.sys is also only 12 gig not 16.

I think what you're seeing there is compression; from memory(*), h.sys is 75% of the size of your RAM by default. You can change it IIRC, but I expect that would be a spectacularly bad idea.

(* - ho ho!!)

Boot logging.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140247-trace-windows-7-bootshutdownhibernatestandbyresume-issues/

Shut it down if its that slow

[img] [/img]

How about creating a ram disk? That would use up some of the memory. IIRC you'll need some 3rd party software to do it, but you should be able to dynamically resize it which would negate the need for a reboot.

I've never done it, but it may be worth a look.

Edit - somthing like this looks like it would do it http://www.snapfiles.com/get/spramdisk.html

Forget all tuning advice above - it's the PGP encryption which is slowing the disk writes massively.

In use MS Bitlocker feels much faster than previous systems with Pointsec and PGP disks. Security might be better with other than MS solutions but I don't care as Bitlocker is approved by my customers.

Good point.

Just set hibernate file compression to 50%. Took about 45 seconds to hibernate plugged in, and about 6 mins to resume on battery 🙁 So PGP could be affecting it, but the resuming is what's slow so it would have to be reads that were the problem.

Hybrid sleep is no good because the machine must be powered off. I could shut down but it takes just as long to restart all my apps.

I have no choice about PGP. Believe me, if I did it would not be on here.

PGP is at fault it's as simple as that. Shame you can't use Bitlocker 🙁

Of course you could also speed it up a touch by disabling hibernation not rebooting and using Sysinternals Contig to defrag hiberfil.sys into one contiguous disk location.

I suspect it's in one block already. I re-installed windows then it created itself straight away - no reason to suspect it's fragged.

I'll try using an uncompressed hibernate file - it may be that decompressing and PGP together are causing the issue. But then again, writing and compressing should be more intensive than reading and uncompressing, and that works fine.

Apparently [url= http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH184961 ]it's a known issue.[/url] FFS 🙁

By default W7 writes 75% of your total RAM to disk on hibernation. You can change this down to 50% mnimum by typing

PowerCfg -HIBERNATE -SIZE 50

This might help a little?

As above, I just tried that. I'm going to try putting it back to 100 to see if the reduced cpu usage of decompression helps PGP work better.

[i]If it were up to me, I'd use sleep mode all the time. However my company requires that I use PGP, and this doesn't work unless the computer is actually off so I am obliged to either shut down or hibernate when I'm not with the machine. [/i]

It's not very secure then, if you can access these kinda settings...

Eh?

I'M not the security risk - it's people who might steal my machine.

I'M not the security risk - it's people who might steal my machine.

6 minutes to resume? How long does a cold start take?

yes and if you were a less conscientious little employee

Well quite, it's not meant to be foolproof - I don't have any sensitive info on here. Non-sensitive users didn't have a requirement for PGP until recently.

Not sure what the alternative is though - not possible to disable sleep mode, is it?

Cold start takes.. 90 seconds maybe? It's certainly not the quickest - seems to be mostly corporate spyware that takes time. It was pretty damn quick after my rebuild till I installed that lot.

Well quite, it's not meant to be foolproof

I don't have any sensitive info on here

If a cold start takes 90 secs and a hibernate waken takes 6 minutes why are you bothering?

Because re-starting all my apps takes ages and is a user-intensive task.

yeah but corporate IT security is supposed to be negligent, malicious idiot proof innit.

That depends on a whole lot of factors. And yes I do know what Sensitive Personal information is, it's clearly defined in our IT policy, and also what to do if you need it.

Sorry molgrips, but you (the employee) are the risk. The majority of frauds are inside jobs:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/693649/most-fraud-is-an-inside-job-says-survey

And most laptops are not stolen, but lost..., through carelessness mainly.

That depends on a whole lot of factors.

And yes I do know what Sensitive Personal information is

Surely your machine is protected by the same password whether it's in sleep or hibernate mode? If you shutdown you might need the login id as well but those are normally to a formula for a company and easy to work out if you know one (so any ex employee could give the structure).

PGP, and this doesn't work unless the computer is actually off so I am obliged to either shut down or hibernate when I'm not with the machine.

eh? really? I'm on dodgy ground now but I thought the idea of these was to encrypt the disc contents - it stops the password being circumvented by attacking the disc directly. When you wake from hibernation doesn't everything get written back to memory BEFORE it asks for a password - ie no different to Sleep.

Also, laptops are often stolen from the office (I've been places where they've been pinched during the day) - do you never walk away from your desk and leave it on?

Surely your machine is protected by the same password whether it's in sleep or hibernate mode?

Windows password yes. There's a BIOS password and a PGP encryption key on this too.

For some reason (dunno why) PGP only works properly when the power is off.

Surely your machine is protected by the same password whether it's in sleep or hibernate mode?

Nope - it still asks for the BIOS password and the PGP passkey.

Yes, machines are often stolen from offices, that's why I am also obliged to use a Kensington lock.

AFAIK IT security policy is supposed to be based on the weakest link

Well yeah if your aim is to stop idiot users from either accidentally or deliberately doing something insecure. However we're not idiot users, we're trusted with a lot of stuff generally, and we need administrator access to do our jobs. So the measure we have are designed to support that.

Whether or not it's the perfect policy is another issue. There's not much else that can be done tbh.

with truecrypt (only one I've used) if you shutdown or hibernate you need to enter the encryption passphrase before it'll boot. If the user decides to put it into standby this doesn't happen goes straight to windows. If windows password is strong enough you [i]might[/i] be ok as whoever ends up with the laptop can't run a password reset boot cd*. Of course if the system isn't locked down and the user can enable system standby they can probably also get rid of the need for that pesky windows password aswell, turning your encrypted, password protected laptop into an open book.

IANA it security specialist, so could be talking cobblers.

*there maybe other ways around it, dunno.

There's a BIOS password

However we're not idiot users, we're trusted with a lot of stuff

It's actually a BIOS HD password I think. So in the HD firmware rather than the machine. Although that might've changed since I installed PGP, not sure.

ah right, dunno owt about hd passwords

By default W7 writes 75% of your total RAM to disk on hibernation. You can change this down to 50% mnimum by typing

PowerCfg -HIBERNATE -SIZE 50

This might help a little?

That's not how it works.

It's writing 100% of the RAM to disk, using compression to fit into a file 75% of the size the RAM. If you resize the hibernation file in that manner you're reducing, well, the file size, not what's being committed. So, if you make the file too small, the contents of RAM won't fit into it, and then Windows will be sad.

Cougar, I think you are just choosing the compression ratio it uses when writing. So at 50% compression the ram will always fit into a file at 50% the size.....?

50% is the minimum anyway.

Well,

One of us is wrong. Quite happy to hold my hand up and say it's me, not something I'm 100% sure about.

I'm not 100% sure either, but I can't imagine they'd let you mandate the file size if they weren't sure it would work.

I can imagine that fairly readily. (-:

You don't use the full 32gb of ram in normal use... If ever. The most you would be using before you hibernate is 1gb or 2... Not 32.

Well, the hibernate file is 32Gb but that may not all be being written to of course. But fact is, it takes 6 mins to resume.

The most you would be using before you hibernate is 1gb or 2

12Gb is normal. Why do you think I have lots of RAM?

[quote=molgrips ]Because re-starting all my apps takes ages and is a user-intensive task.
Put them in the Startup Folder

It'll still take just as long. It's the 5 minutes of hard disk thrashing after you log in that slows it all down. I'd still have to log into things and the like.

Trust me, I'm not a total numpty. I do know there are alternatives, but I would just quite like it if features that should be available actually worked.

[quote=molgrips ]
Trust me, I'm not a total numpty.
60 squillion threads on STW suggest otherwise...... 🙂

Weirdo.

You're the one failing to solve a problem then blaming me for having it.

[i]60 squillion threads on STW suggest otherwise...... [/i]

😆

Gave the RAM disk as go, using it for the cache in Chrome and for temp files, have to say I'm impressed with the difference in browsing speed.

EDITED

Already done ramdisks, didn't make a lot of difference. More concerned about the hibernate issue tbh.

RAM disks [i]shouldn't[/i] work on a modern system, from a raw performance point of view. I'm going out in a minute and that's a long explanation that I've not got time to type, but I'd be curious to hear whether that 'impressive difference' is real or perceived. Ie, have you timed it?

Good point I'll have to work out a test just to see by how much. Off to Google some ideas on how to test.

The RAM disk thing - it depends what you use them for. The best suggestion is to use them for browser caches. They can be made persistent.

They ONLY work though if you have plenty of physical RAM left over. If the ramdisk is at risk of being swapped into the page file then you're wasting your time.

Incidentally, on the subject of browser caches - I'm considering putting the cache on an SD card on my Vaio P - it's very under powered and under batteried, and the disk is slow and spends a lot of time going, even when browsing. Some or most of this is cache activity.