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Free and open-source software portal; This is a category of articles relating to system software which can be freely used, copied, studied, modified, and redistributed by everyone that obtains a copy: "free software" or "open-source software".
SoftRAM and SoftRAM95 were system software products that claimed to increase or even double the available random-access memory in Microsoft Windows without the need for a hardware upgrade, which is theoretically possible using memory compression. However, it later emerged that the program did not have any actual compression algorithm.
Some RAM drives when used with 32-bit operating systems (particularly 32-bit Microsoft Windows) on computers with IBM PC architecture allow memory above the 4 GB point in the memory map, if present, to be used; this memory is unmanaged and not normally accessible. [2] Software using unmanaged memory can cause stability problems.
A system with 512 MB of RAM (the minimum requirement for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost. [14] [15] In one test case, adding 1 GB of ReadyBoost memory sped up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds. However, increasing the physical memory (RAM) from 512 MB to 1 GB (without ReadyBoost) reduced it to 0.8 seconds. [16]
As SSD technology continues to improve, they are increasingly used in ultra-mobile PCs and lightweight laptop systems. The first flash-memory SSD based PC to become available was the Sony Vaio UX90, announced for pre-order on 27 June 2006 and began shipping in Japan on 3 July 2006 with a 16 GB flash memory hard drive. [158]
Historically, most SSDs used buses such as SATA, SAS, or Fibre Channel for interfacing with the rest of a computer system. Since SSDs became available in mass markets, SATA has become the most typical way for connecting SSDs in personal computers; however, SATA was designed primarily for interfacing with mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs), and it became increasingly inadequate for SSDs, which ...
BIOS POST has initialized the system timers, interrupt controller(s), DMA controller(s), and other motherboard/chipset hardware as necessary to bring all BIOS services to ready status. DRAM refresh for all system DRAM in conventional memory and extended memory, but not necessarily expanded memory, has been set up and is running.
A portion of the computer's hard drive is set aside for a paging file or a scratch partition, and the combination of physical RAM and the paging file form the system's total memory. (For example, if a computer has 2 GB (1024 3 B) of RAM and a 1 GB page file, the operating system has 3 GB total memory available to it.) When the system runs low ...