Sunil Suresh,
I use ramdisks when I surely know a folder will have a ton of writes.

Thom, 64bit Windows are notorious for wasting RAM so much so that Microsoft now compress paged memory by default since so much of it is repeated bytes of zero's where an 8bit byte is allocated 1 storage unit of RAM that is 64bits wide resulting in 7 unusable 8bit bytes, similar if you want 16bit integer you get 6 unusable extra bytes allocated even with a 32bit u/long you get 32bits of 4 bytes wasted the only saving grace is these strings of zerod 8 bit bytes are very compressible with even run length encoding let alone anything like LZW compression... If you have low cost laptop or tablet with a 64bit edition of windows and 4G or less RAM it's not for multi-tasking or doing anything that might use a Gig of RAM as the system will get bogged down compressing, writing to paging file and reading from paging file and expanding the virtual memory similar to older systems with much smaller amounts of system RAM... disk thrashing but you won't hear it or see it as modern systems with only SSD drives don't even have drive activity LEDs any more. The system will just fall to a crawl and the SSD will have it's life shortened by all the erase write cycles as the SSD thrashes away. Technically windows should use in an extended session 90 to 100% with all the RAM not being allocated to any given process is allocated to the vcache dynamically allocated storage cache. As any unused RAM is simply wasted storage space. The vcache is deallocated as needed by processes.
TK

TheKOE, ditto

King Kong, 1-Yes , 2-No

King Kong, the only use cases I can imagine for this software is if you have a 32-bit OS or are running 32-bit software which can only address about 3.5gb RAM, and you have hardware that has and supports more RAM than this (e.g., your PC has 8 gb RAM). In those cases, this software will use the excess RAM that your OS or software can't address to create the RAM disk and the RAM disk will be faster than HDD read/writes

alordofchaos,
If you have 8GB ram and 64 bit OS, you maybe are not using your swap file, so effectively are running in a RAM disk already. The swap file should only be used if you can't fit running apps in the 8GB.

"Ram disk reduces ram available, resulting virtual memory on hard drive to be used. Will this not retard speed?"

Depends... Windows, especially Win11, is pretty darn good at managing memory use -- it can run with just 2GB RAM, .e.g., on my cheap tablet. And as you'll see when you open Task Mgr., different apps use/require different amounts of RAM. As you'll also see in Task Mgr., plenty of background processes consume RAM, but are not very active, using 0% of the CPU, so if whatever they have stored in RAM is written to hard disk, it does not really matter.

The usefulness of a RAM disk is extremely fast disk access. If you have a task or process where this would be an advantage, all you can do is try Gilisoft Ramdisk and see if there's an overall improvement or not.

"Will 4 GB of ram remain intact by this software?"

If you mean will a RAM disk retain whatever's stored on it, then no, it will be cleared whenever the power to the RAM is cut off, e.g., shutting down or restarting. You might use a RAM disk for caching temporary data, or maybe copy the VHD with a VM to the RAM disk and run it from there, knowing that after a restart you'll have to repeat the process starting fresh with the VM.

King Kong, not sure with this one, but there are other always free ones that can... some use PXE RAM above 3G the real limit on non-patched 32bit systems by maintaining their own above 3G allocation tables and some can use above 4G PXE RAM in patched 32bit windows system... advantages of patching 32bit windows to use up to 64G RAM is windows can use it as storage cache and the RAMDRIVE residing within the extended memory allocation can be saved by hibernating the machine but not forever as windows needs a restart periodically to empty out the built in resource leaks that makes it unstable if you keep it online for many weeks at a time. I have experimented with Ramdrives before in a patched and unpatched 32bit system with 8G of RAM total and in use it's more just a comforting idea that does not really amount to any significant improvement in the long run but does result in increased potential failure points in the 3rd party ring0 coding. I'll download this and keep it if it looks better designed than the always free ones I already have but never use. depending upon the way the license is supplied and validated during the giveaway.
TK

I've used RAM disks in the past. They are kind of a dying thing now-a-days, at least for normal users, but they still have their use for power users.

In the old days you used them for anything you need to read/write truly fast since back then you just had super slow HDDs, or in the early SSD days they were great for things you read/write all the time to keep wear and tare off your drives. Back when SSDs had horrible longevity I use to use RAM disk to keep TMP files from destroying my drives in a matter of months... but that's not an issue now. Good NVMe drives can take a lot of abuse.

Nowadays if you have a system with 128GB of ram and you want to do something intense I/O wise and don't want to just wear out your pricey NVMe drive by doing 100+TB of I/O on it for temp files you can usually snag 32~64GB of your ram and use it for your insane I/O project save the results, and then release the ram back into the wild.

The other reason you'd use them is security. If you want to work with files completely in ram and want to make sure they never touch a physical drive where they could potentially be recovered.

Overall pretty specialized in the modern day and age.

TK, apparently not, my 32bit system is patched to allow the use of up to 64Gig and has 8Gig RAM installed the user interface on creation of the ramdisk reports 1.8G in use and 6G free (used as windows dynamic drive caching) it won't let me create even 4000Mbyte NTFS Ramdrive reporting there is not enough memory available... so no this driver does not seem to handle PXE RAM even if supported by windows. uninstalling now as it does not support my base systems installed and useable RAM.
TK

alordofchaos, it does not properly use PXE RAM above 4G boundary in a patched 32bit system that can use up to 64G of RAM within windows but has 8G of RAM fitted.
TK

King Kong, This tool is only useful if you have ample RAM. I will test it on the two machines I have with at least 32 GB RAM.

I would not try it on machines with less than 4 GB. On machines with 6 or 8 GB, you could try and use it when browsing etc.

King Kong,

1. yes, you have to walk the tightrope between slowing your system by reducing physical RAM and speeding up (virtual) disk access. It might be worth the while however if you run a program that, for instance, logs a lot, e. g. a webserver. Rule of thumb, don't even try on Windows if your system has less than 8 GB of RAM.

2. Unfortunately, no.

alordofchaos, that's not how it works.

The memory used by RAM disk software such as this has to be requested from the operating system like any other memory allocation; it can't use memory that isn't accessible to the OS.

Also, running 32-bit software under a 64-bit OS doesn't limit you to a total memory usage of 4GB; it only limits you to 4GB per 32-bit process (i.e. you can have three 32-bit programs using 3GB each with no problem). (Technically, 32-bit programs on Windows are usually limited to 2GB but it's possible to bypass that restriction and give them 4GB of address space by building a "large address aware" executable.)

Furthermore, excess RAM that you're not using will tend to get used for things like disk caching anyway.

Outside of things like a Linux-style "Live CD", about the only circumstances under which a RAM disk is typically useful is if you have a specific application for which you need extremely high disk speed, can live with losing any data it's writing (a RAM disk's content will be lost if the computer crashes), and where reducing general system performance is an acceptable tradeoff (or you have so much RAM that the performance degradation is minimal).

There's a reason RAM disks are rarely used.