Knowledge Base Article provides
a link with the driver download address (57 KB).It is possible to speed up the printing process via OLE by redirecting the temporary files from MSWord to a virtual ramdisk drive. For this redirection, it is necessary to set the TEMP environment variable with Windows to a virtual drive. Since reading- and writing operations are then executed in the memory, printing with OLE becomes significantly faster. Here, it is to consider, that the virtual drive capacity remains big enough and that no important data is stored here.
Virtual ramdisks can be used for Windows versions 95/98, NT 4, 2000 and XP without a problem. Under Windows 95/98 the entry device=c:\windows\ramdrive.sys 16384 /e in file CONFIG.SYS is enough to create a 16 MB ramdisk (maximum size is 32 MB).
Under Windows 2000 it is possible to
upgrade a ramdisk with a free Microsoft driver. The Knowledge Base Article provides
a link with the driver download address (57 KB).
The file RAMDISK.EXE is a self-unpacking archive, which decompresses them via double-click into any directory. The ramdisk driver now integrates them as a new device into the system. For this, please open the system control and go to "System". Start the hardware assistant in the register "Hardware". After the compulsory welcome message, please select "Add device" in the next window, click "Continue" and then "Add new device". After, please mark the option "No, select hardware component manually from list" and click "Continue" again. In the following menu select the entry "Other devices" as the "Hardware type" and click "Memory medium" in the next dialog window.
Now, Windows 2000 asks for the path to the installation files. Please indicate the directory with the unpacked driver. After the installation, ramdisk is immediately available as drive Z:.
After this setup, the ramdisk default size is only 1 MB. To change the size, please start REGEDIT.EXE, since the configuration is processed completely via registry. All driver parameters can be found in the key "Hkey_Local_Machine\SystemControlSet001\Services\Ramdisk\Parameters". The entry "DriveLetter" assigns the indicated drive letter to the ramdisk. "DiskSize" defines the size in Byte. Please enter the value either as a hex-value or as a decimal value. The ramdisk size is limited to 1F00000 (hex), which is equivalent to a size of roughly 31 MB. A 16 MB ramdisk can be created via hex-value "1000000", "800000" would result in roughly 8 MB. The ramdisk rejects invalid size specifications, but this does not have any effect on the system.
Please reboot after each parameter modification. In case the ramdisk is no longer needed, it is either possible to reset the registry size to zero, or to uninstall the driver with the hardware assistant.