My Windows XP Pro begines to crush recently, and always a blue screen death with the follwing comments(Brief):

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Win32k.sys error
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
.
.
.
STOP OX 00000050 ( OX FBDB32D0, OX 00000000, OX BF871d33, OX 00000000)

Win32k.sys - Address BF871d33 Base at BF80000000

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"STOP ox 00000050" & " Win32k.sys - Address BF871d33 Base at BF80000000" never changes for each time.

Please help me out of this if any of you has some clue on this.

Thanks in advance

Ole

If you have more than 256mb of RAM disable virtual memory

why trun off virtual memory? You can never have too much memory! (16 browser windows + photoshop + imageReady doesn't work with 256MB RAM, I know from personal experence :))

Because virtual memory uses your hard disk. Standard ata100 HDDs operate at a max sustained transfer rate of 66mb per second, standard pc133 RAM operates at like 500mb per second. If you care about performance, and have plenty of RAM (>256mb) DISABLE VIRTUAL MEMORY

I had a very similar problem with Win2k... The problem stemmed from "ReachOut", so after getting into the machine in safe mode or something, I uninstalled it, and everything was dandy again...

heres a quick fix for that problem http://www.mandrake.com , whcih i can now say i am using :)

No! You are miguiding the children! The real fix is at http://www.debian.org ! :-P

Hmm...and now onto a real answer or something. NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER DISABLE VIRTUAL MEMORY (OR SWAP)!!!!!!!! It makes the machine more efficient! Why? Because guess what gets swapped out first? THE PROGRAMS YOU AREN'T USING! Which makes more ram available for things you are actually using. I have 384MB of ram and 4GB of swap (just getting ready for whenever I get a board with 1.5GB of ram :); free -m reports that I have about 300MB free (if you don't count buffers), but I am still using about 50MB of swap. Why? Because the daemons are all swapped out. Since stuff like cron only runs once a day, there is no reason it should use up ram. Same goes for the many other daemons that are running. On Windows there has to be something similar. Also, when apps have memory leaks, the leaked ram will eventually find its way to swap (it isn't being accesed after all), which will help speed up things more. What is this with speed up? Well, the more free ram you have, the more the kernel can cache disk accesses, which increases performance. So, the moral of the story is: use swap, and lots of swap, because it actually makes things faster and allows you to run more programs.

I'm sorry but you are so full of crap it is practically hilarious. You don't believe me, fine, but ask anyone on forumOC, a message board full of people dedicated to getting the most possible performance out of their machines. The person with the highest overclock record is on there constantly, his username is F1, he overclocked a 1.4 Athlon to 2.2ghz, he is ABSOLUTELY OBSESED with pushing his machine to the limit, he will tell you to disable virtual memory. Your harddrive is the biggest bottle neck of your system, of ANY system, why on earth would you rather use something that has a max transfer rate of 66mb/s over something thats max is 500-1000mb/s (And yes, I have known people who have attained 1ghz throughput from their memory) Not only that, using aggressive memory timings such as the more common 2/2/2 makes the difference even larger, typical HDD seek times for high end ATA100/133 drives are around 6-7ms, using aggressive timings your RAM can switch between read/write mode in only 2ms. So in closing, I and the 14000 members of ForumOC, A message board dedicated to overclocking and pushing our machines to their limit, know what we are talking about, unkown_lamer does not.

No, codered, you are in fact the idiot. Maybe Windows sucks at VM, but the Linux kernel does not. The reason you want swap enabled is so that you _don't_ have to use your disk! By swapping out unused data, the kernel can allocate more ram for disk cache, which reduces the usage of your disk! Any performance benefit you get by not having swap enabled is canceled when you consider the advantages of having a larger disk cache.

Think about this situation: you have 512MB of ram. No swap. You are running lots of programs, but are only useing a few. Because of the number of things you are running, you have a tiny disk cache (say 10MB). So now every time you want to fetch a file from disk you have to actually use the disk. Same for writing because you have no room for a write buffer.

Now if you had swap enabled, say a 100MB of programs would be swapped out and would stay there, incurring a tiny delay when you started to use them again every few hours. In returns for that 1 or 2 second delay it takes to unswap them, you now have a 70MB disk cache and a 40MB write buffer. Now when you want a file, the chances of it being in cache are much higher. This increases overall performance. If you want a more realistic example, consider my machine...I have 384MB of ram, all of which is being used right now. Of the used memory, 300 is for disk cache. I am using about 70MB of ram (the other 10 or so is for the write buffer). I have 60MB of programs swapped out right now (that will all basically stay there until about 2 in the morning or whenever they do their jobs). If I had no vm, I would have a 60MB smaller disk cache, slowing down my system.

When you are on a system with a small amount of ram, then you actually have running programs in swap. But when you have a large amount of ram (256MB+), swap can only help you by allowing you to have larger disk buffers (because you said it yourself, the disk is the slowest part of the system, and reducing access to it increases performance).

Ill agree that I don't have any experience with it in *nix, but everything I said holds true for windows.

Which shows how bad the windows VM is I guess. If you have a _good_ VM swap only helps. I've heard that the FreeBSD VM is amazing (it destroyed linux's vm before the new VM was put in in 2.4.10...).