When UBCD first starts up, the Ramdrive size is reported as 300 Megabytes or more but is then resized to 95. This seems like a bad thing. Is it?

Are you really going to need a 300Meg ramdrive? I haven't seen that happen on any of my systems, but then again I usually put the CD in, boot, and walk away for a few minutes. I'll have to check it out more. Yes it seems a bit bad. I'm honestly not sure what is going on with the ramdrivers. Over the past 6 months we have seen several different versions of the ramdriver included with Bart's PE. The first version included was from Qsoft. After some time I guess he decided he didn't like the version that was included with BPE (they had some type of agreement). So he asked Bart to include a different version. That version was coded to kick out more pop ups asking for a donation for his ramdrive. That annoyed a lot of people, a lot of people complained about it here. So I switched back to the older driver to try and fix it. Then I noticed that Bart has his own ramdriver he may start including in future versions, it's currently in the latest beta from him. So I included his beta ramdriver in 2.5.

It's a long annoying story and I'm honestly not sure what to do. Several months ago I did contact Qsoft and they said I could purchase a bulk license for his ramdriver, with no annoying messages or strange behavior. However it costs about $3 per user and it would be hard to keep track of downloads, get people to pay, etc. I posted about this several months ago and no one really responded to it. If a lot of people were interested in the "paid" driver it is something I could do but a large majority of people just want free.

I will check into it more and do some testing with several different ramdrivers. If I can find a better combination it will be included in the next release of the project.

SteelTrepid,

The ramdrive gets as big as 300 MB when you have 1 GB of RAM However, I've never checked its size once the UBCD is fully loaded ! I'll try tonight.

Daniel

The problem is "real" - the newest driver is limited to 96MB. Simply use an older ramdriv.sys version ("newer is not always better") and you'll have larger RAMDrives again. Though it is unlikely you'll need one larger, I often do, and enjoy the option of a huge RAMDrive. You have been saving those previous versions of UBCD4Win, haven't you?

DW

Yeah I have all version of the project archived. I changed the ramdriver several times, remember last time when the "popups" incedent happened.....I just pulled the older version from a previous version. Now, Bart has his own and I really thought that it wouldn't be so limited. That's why I included it with the new version of the project, plus the guy at Qsoft ticked me off a bit so I figured we could move on to something different. I'm wondering if that's the same reason Bart is starting to use his own???

@Steel:

I KNOW you have all the previous releases!

Really was directed at those who may be annoyed by the smaller RAMDrive... the popups are so infrequent that I have a hard time ever seeing one - and one mouse click is a small price to pay for having a driver that allows very large RAMDisk sizes. I suppose if one-mouse click is too much for someone, they can live with the 96MB limitation (which should be enough for most people anyway - though my expreience has been that folks want more of whatever-it-is, no matter if they need it or not).

DW

Well, I for one want more of whatever-it-is, no matter if I need it or not. All of Western Civilization has led me to think bigger is better! I was wondering what would happen if it was not resized or is there no way to turn that off?

Edit: I found the resize plugin and I'm trying it without that plugin now.

Without the resizer, it ends up at 95 megs if you edit the inf. For me, that seems the best option as it saves a little time. (Maybe it never was 300 megs, maybe it was only the default 32 megs. It goes by pretty fast.) All the computers that I will use it on have plenty of memory.

Maybe it's time to remove the autoramsizer plugin then? Maybe set up the ramdrive to a default value of 32Meg or 64Meg and include instructions on the site or in the forum on how to adjust it?? I think the time savings would be beneficial, however then we need to decide what would be the "ideal" default size. How much space does any of the tools occupy in the ramdrive? I'm working on an Ethereal plugin at the moment and if I have to load it to the ramdrive it occupies 35.5 Meg!! It actually works more running from the CD rather than the ramdrive, however I cannot get it fully functional. So I'm hoping to figure out how to get it to run from the CD rather than the ramdrive. But I'm not sure how much space current tools take up on the ramdrive when loaded, since some tools have to be run from the ramdrive.

I rely on the autoramsizer quite a bit and I'd hate to see it completely removed. Maybe just set it to disabled by default? I would rather just be able to enable it as opposed to adding the plugin and hope that it works with the current ubcd4win release.

hehe, we could always just add a program that runs in the background waiting to terminate any popup window titled "autoramsizer" until the author realizes that this new popup "feature" isn't going to help him make money

Tom