I’m curious about increasing the speed of Windows 11 by loading it (or at least the most commonly used files) entirely into RAM. Is there a method to keep the OS and possibly specific applications, like Firefox, loaded in RAM all the time? Any ideas or tools that could help with this?
8 Answers
Windows doesn’t support a full temporary file system driver (tmpfs) like some other OSes. So, while you can manage what loads into RAM, remounting the root in that way isn’t feasible.
While not directly answering your question about Windows, you might explore using RAM as a drive for certain applications. There are specialized OSes that run on RAM and reset after a shutdown, which is fun for experiments.
Look into Grub4Dos for setting up a RAM drive. It allows you to copy OS and programs to the RAM drive and run them from there. You can automate this with batch files too. But you might not find lots of folks in this forum who’ve experimented with it, so good luck!
Before diving into complex solutions, maybe consider why you’re looking to speed up Windows. Sometimes it’s just the hardware that’s the issue. If you’ve got older components, they might need an upgrade first.
If you’re looking to speed up your system, getting a decent SSD can work wonders!
I already have a Samsung 980 Pro NVMe, so I’m good there!
RAM is meant to cache data from your larger storage drives, so overloading it with unnecessary files could just make it harder for your system to function efficiently. Windows is already quite efficient at managing RAM usage.
Windows already does a pretty good job of loading frequently used files into RAM to speed things up. If your system feels slow, it could be due to other factors like using a traditional hard drive instead of an SSD. If you’re not already using an SSD, that might be your best upgrade. That’s really where the performance increase will come from!
I think OP meant having Windows loaded entirely in RAM like an ISO. That’s theoretically possible but not very practical in real-world use.
Yeah, I have an NVME drive and I know Windows manages memory well. Just wanted to play around with some tech tools like RamMap to see what’s loaded and what’s not.
Yes, Windows will load what it needs into memory. Some people complain about high RAM usage, but that’s just Windows optimizing itself for performance. Also, putting your PC to sleep instead of shutting it down keeps everything in RAM and ready to go.
My main goal is just curiosity and experimenting with performance.