Nobody-Important

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Oct 31, 2013
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I have two big issues stemming from programs that are badly optimized. I have come up with possible solutions for each of them and i would like someone who isnt a total noob to give me a reality check on them.

ISSUE1: 32bit but using too much RAM
A particular game i absolutely love is now close to a decade old but still the best in its series. There are however so many mods and DLC for it (to the tune of about 20 GB) that the 4GB limit on memory for 32bit programs is practically never enough. Since the program is still running though i assume it is mapping virtual RAM to the pagefile. I don't know if this is the case. Is the addressspace of virtual memory on the HDD different from that of normal ram? If it isn't i don't know why the program keeps running without errors despite it having run out of normal memory - albeit very, very slowly. If the addresspace of the pagefile is different, that means a 32bit program could use virtual ram beyond the 4GB of ram that it can normally access.
If this second case is true making the pagefile inordinately fast would possibly solve the program running super slow.
If that is the case wouldn't it be theoretically possible to make a ramdisk out of the remaining part of the memory, effectively creating a partition with a superfast rw speed, and then plop a pagefile down there?
In essence the question is whether using RAM as a pagefile would get around a speed bottleneck created by the 32 bit program only being able to access a 4GB namespace.
So could i do this?
If so how?

ISSUE2: 64bit but using 30GB RAM out of 8GB
A different program i'm using is particularly badly optimized, probably having memory leaks and using much more memory than it has any right to be using. While i cannot fix the proprietary program, the max 60MiB/s read speed of my HDD means that the 20GB pagefile the program creates is excruciatingly slow to work with.
Since i cannot install more RAM on this motherboard and an SSD of sufficient size would be half the price of a new laptop, i am forced to look for other options.
I do have a PCIE card reader installed and a small sdxc card lying around though.
With its RW speed being at least twice that of my HDD wouldn't dedicating it to a pagefile lead to at least a modicum of performance increase?
With this being an integrated reader the usual problem of removable devices being used as memory - the "what if its knocked loose" issue - does not arise. With the PCIE reader having the card as the limiting factor and the sdxc card being about as fast as a low grade SSD, it would be similar to but cheaper than getting an SSD for better pagefileing.
So could i do this?
If so how?

PS: Both of these could be impacted by the ReadyBoost tech windows has, depending on how that works, but i fail to understand what exactly that does. So how about that thing?

Thanks in advance!
 
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To make use of additional ram on a 32bit system you have to enable PAE ,after that you just make a normal ram drive.
You can use taskmanager beforehand to see how much ram the game actually uses,maybe one of the patches/mods you use already does this.
https://www.megaleecher.net/ramdisk
If the utility fails to recognize full installed RAM capacity, simply enable the PAE mode in BOOT.INI and merge ram4g.reg registry file found in archive followed by an system reboot.