adding more memory to windows

[eemer]

Hey guys. I installed a few games onto my Windows partition, but they run a little glitchy and slow. What do I need to add to Windows to make them run smoother/faster? Can it be done, and how? Thank you!

I should add that I don't use Windows for anything other than gaming.. but it is 7 games of The Sims.. which takes up quite a bit of space I'm assuming.. I can't remember what I set the partition at before.. how do I check that too? Thanks for any help, again!

 

[Lovesong]

Which mac do you have? What are the specs for it? (i.e.- how much RAM, what HD, if it's not a mini or a MB what is your video card, etc.) A little more info would help to narrow your problem.
Chances are that for gaming, the two most important factors will be RAM and VRAM, rather than HD space, though if you have less than 1GB of space, then you could also be eaing away at the scratch space. You can find all this info by clicking the blue apple (top left), and selecting "about this mac". Then click on more info. To see how much space you have on your Windows partition, just double click on the HD on your desktop (if you formatted the disk in FAT32), or find it in Disk Utility (in finder just press apple-shift-u).

 

[jdechko]

You don't have to install anything to make it faster, but I'd suggest turning off some windows services to free up ram.

This article describes what you can and can't turn off and how to go about doing it.

It's especially good if you're on a computer with limited resources (read: little RAM).

You can even kill windows explorer (bring up the task manager, click on the processes tab, find explorer.exe and click "end process"). After you kill it, you can just use the task manager to launch your games. The benefit: explorer can use 20-30 MB of RAM, while task manager uses 5-6. On a machine with only 384 MB (like my laptop), that's a huge savings.

In addition, you can speed up the games by reducing some of the settings (lower video settings and/or resolution, for instance) This will help if you're on , say, a macbook, mini or low-end iMac without a dedicated graphics card. (the first part will help as well as the graphics memory is shared between the processes and the gpu - fewer process = less RAM used for processes = more ram available.

Finally, if you're booted in windows, you can just right click on the C: drive and it will tell you the used/free/total space available, which, consequently, is the size of your bootcamp partition.

 

[eemer]

sorry, I should have been more specific.. I'm using a Mac OS X version 10.4.8

It says I have a 1.83 GHz processor and by Memory I have 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.. not sure about that last bit!

Also, when I'm on windows, I make sure I'm not using any other programs.. infact, as I said, I only use Windows for gaming, there's actually nothing else on there (I quit explorer when I play too )

Okay, I'm not sure if thisis right, but under my HD it says I have 36.15 GB available, and on the windows I have 63.01 .

Hmm what does all this mean!

 

[eemer]

Okay so, I'm booted in Windows, and it says I have only used up a mere 7.73 GB of my 70.7 GB capacity!! Do you think my gaming is running soo slowly just because of background services?? Is that really it??

 

[jdechko]

Okay so, I'm booted in Windows, and it says I have only used up a mere 7.73 GB of my 70.7 GB capacity!! Do you think my gaming is running soo slowly just because of background services?? Is that really it??

With 1 GB of RAM, it's not likely that your services are your bottleneck. But at 1.83 GHz, I'd venture a guess that you have one of the machines I listed above (MB, Mini, low-end iMac) that lack a discrete graphics card (that is, the graphics is integrated and the RAM is shared). Is that correct? What kind of computer do you have?

You may want to try reducing some of the settings.