Thanks have to go out to all the people responsible for this for this to happen. The Ramdisk for Windows 2000 as you have come to know it for your network protocol was put together with the help of Philip of Speedguide.net, Cablenut, of Cablenut.com/BroadbandNuts.com, Donald_k that gave his free time to help out at Speedguide.
JonG Programmer of Cablenut.com/Broadbandnuts.com
Dannjr Cablenut.com/Broadbandnuts.com.
Ide also like to extend a thanks to Lance and Micro of our forums for there help on testing the setup from this set of pages.
Also to the hundreds of people that with added input have helped make this work.

This tweak is a "use at your own risk". Broadbandnuts.com Cablenut.com and Speedguide.net and dslnuts.com along with contributors assume no responsibility in the event things go wrong.However we will try to help you through the bumps that you might run into with this.

We do know that this tweak works and that it will probably add a few extra hours to the life of your hard drive along with a possibility of lowering Latency and Decreasing the need for rebooting due to memory swap, and possibly speeding up your connection. The best part with your imagination you can put just about anything you want on a ramdisk.

If you're a beginner you might want to go through the steps a few times before trying this tweak. If you have any problems, or questions, please try to keep them for the Forums, here at DSLnuts or at Speedguide. Emailing us will just slow the process down as much as a week or more due to the large amount of email that we all get.

If you're ready lets get started.

You should know that depending on how the Ramdisk is installed this will add time to your boot up process. As much as 3 minutes give or take, but for most it could be shorter.

The Ramdisk program we will use is from Microsoft and can be downloaded from here
MS Ramdisk for NT5 or Windows 2000. Not WinXP.
Make sure to download it now to your machine.

WE DONT NESSASARLY SUPPORT THIS WITH WINDOWS XP

MS Ramdisk

1.) Extract the contents to a safe place on your system.

2.) The contents include "source files", the "sys file", and the ".inf file".

3.) Open or go to the Control Panel, then goto; Add New Hardware, next; Choose From List & then goto and pick; "Other Device" then goto; "Have Disk" then goto and; Point to the ".inf file."
Let it load. that just installed the Ramdisk.

4.) At this point you need to Back up your Registry. By now with Windows 2000 you should know how to do this. But as a refresher in the Windows help files there is a explanation on this. Also you can export a copy of the registry. Simply open the registry from the run command (Type regedit and the ok button or enter key) With the registry open, highlight My Computer, using the pull down menu's find export and click on it. This will open a new window to save the registry. Name it, and save to a safe place, preferably as close to or on the root of the drive as possible.
I would also suggest you read up on making a control console in case all goes wrong this could save you from a lot of problems. Not just what we do here, It wont take long to do everything you need to make up the console is on your CD that came with windows on it.

5.) We now need to go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
\Services\Ramdisk\Parameters
Back this key up, do a export of this section now and save it to a folder called Ramdisk_bu
name the file ramdisk.
Here you will make your Ramdisk size and assign it a drive letter.

6.) Disk veiw as seen in the registry.

Click on image for full veiw.

7.) One of the only things we want to worry about now is the 'Disk Size' and 'Drive Letter'.
Your going to be setting the size of the drive to bytes as seen above

8.) 1MB is 1,048,576 bytes so if you wanted 2MB Ramdisk you would enter a decimal value of 2,097,152. Drive letter of course means what drive letter the Ramdisk makes itself.

9.) So the next time we reboot our Ramdisk will be whatever we made it. For all practical purposes for this example we made it 1MB and Drive Letter Z:\ Which is default. But you will be able to make it what you want it to be as long as you don't try to make it the same as exsisting drives on your machine.

AT THIS POINT YOU MAY WANT TO REBOOT DEPENDANT ON YOUR SKILL LEVEL
After the reboot verify that the drive took.

10.) So before you reboot. You would also have to do some other things. As below now.
1.)First you need to edit the TCPIP, and AFD ImagePath entries like this:The \??\
Before the drive letter is crucial. Like in the sample picture.
Note: You will be going to the keys below it is recomended that you also do a
export of both of these keys to the "Ramdisk_bu folder" before making changes.
Name the files AFD_BU and TCP_BU

2.)Find, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\
CurrentControlSet\Services\AFD
and, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip

Click on image for full veiw.



Hint the path above is \??\Z:\afd.sys
11.) In those key's is where the 'imagepath' key is. We want to edit these to reflect where are new sys files will be on our Ramdisk. As in the example above.

12.) At this point is where we need a script to start everything up on bootup not only will this test the Ramdisk but it will run it as well, this script will copy the needed files up to the Ramdisk and start the protocol services
Copy everything between the lines and paste it to a open note pad.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
@echo on

copy c:\winnt\System32\DRIVERS\tcpip.sys Z:\
copy c:\winnt\System32\DRIVERS\afd.sys Z:\

net start afd
net start tcpip
net start dhcp

ipconfig

@pause

-----------------------------------------------------------------

13.) Save the file as TCP.BAT this could be Protocol.bat or even Ramdisk.bat…
Make sure to change the drive letter to the drive your using "("Z:\" ) is the sample. So if your using Z:\ or F:\ change that to reflect your ramdisk, that your going to have on your machine. Copy, that file to your startup, So that it will start on bootup

Note: the TCP.BAT you just made in the note pad needs to be saved as a .BAT
or have the extension on it to reflect it as a batch file if it looks like a standard text
file rename it to TCP.BAT later on this will have to be renamed TCP.CMD. The note
pad by default puts the extension .txt on the end of every file. The batch file
should have what looks like a blue border with a gear look inside of it.

14.) Time to get ready to reboot. This will sound strange but make sure that if you using Zone Alarm or Norton products that they are disabled for the test. You may have to put them in as part of the startup script, If you don't use the second part of the instructions. At this time the Ramdisk is set.

15.) Boot the machine. Make sure you breath, at this point you need to stay awake to see it startup. Remember this will take longer than your used to seeing in the booting up.
After the script runs and the protocols start the script will pause waiting for you to hit the enter key we put the @pause in the script so that you can see it start up and for diagnostics.
I have one machine here that takes a while to boot but runs for a month before it needs to be rebooted its set up just this way.

Note: If for any reason the Ramdisk gives you a problem or won't start your Network Protocol's. Simply restore the AFD_BU.reg TCP_BU.reg and ramdisk.reg this will keep the ramdisk in place and restore the registry to its default settings allowing you to be able to get on line to figure out what may have gone wrong.

Congratulations you should now have a Ramdisk, on your windows 2000 machine.

Now lets go on to Page two.

If you need additional help with this you can go

here on our forum or here at the Speedguide forum.


by Dannjr