RAMDisks have been around for a long time, they were popular in the 80's when physical disks were amazingly slow.
A few years ago gigabyte released a product called iRAM which was a PCI card that let you install SDRAM into it, and use it as a RAMDisk, with a battery backup to hold its contents when the power was off.
The biggest problem, obviously, is that software RAMDisks are volatile. Every time you reboot the machine you lose the contents of the ramdisk. So you'll need to copy stuff into it again. Considering most games are multiple gigabytes these days, you might get tired of copying files all the time - plus you'll really need more memory allocated to your RAMDisk than system RAM which seems a little pointless....
You could try moving your pagefile to RAMDisk, but really, apps that are flogging your pagefile would be better serviced by more system RAM, taking RAM away for a RAMDisk is a bit silly... The pagefile is used by windows for things other than simply virtual memory but its really not that much data in the big scheme of things, I doubt you'd really see a lot of benefit there outside of benchmarks.
The big advantage I can see is for programs that do their own caching, like if you were working on a big file in photoshop or something, my understanding is that a lot of those apps will page out a lot of their data even if there is free RAM, so having that programs cache on a RAMdisk could be beneficial.
Also, 32bit desktop versions of Windows are hard limited to 4GB address space for system RAM no matter what. I can't see anything on that site that suggests that this particular RAMdisk software gets around that. Don't get confused by people talking about unlocking PAE in Windows, all that is used for is Data Execution Prevention unless you're running a server version of Windows . It won't let your 32 bit OS magically address more than 4GB of memory despite what people seem to think. (or whatever your effective amount is once your hardware has been allocated its address space, leaving the remainder of that 4GB free for system RAM). This is due to a limitation enforced by microsoft. It's theoretically possible but in practice it causes more problems than it solves.
That 1GB you said you were unable to use won't be 'unlocked' by a RAMdisk, as all the address space must still fit into 4GB in a 32 bit OS.... in effect a 1GB RAMdisk will leave you with 2GB effective system RAM. Barring some black magic voodoo that this particular RAMDisk software does, but I really don't think this is the case.
really... just upgrading to 64 bit windows is by far the easiest solution
EDIT: just saw this on their site
RamDisk Plus 11 has a most unique feature. Our patent pending technology can access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system! In other words, RamDisk Plus 11 can use "unmanaged" Windows' memory e.g. above 4GB. It can also use the stubbornly inaccessable memory between 3.2GB and 4GB.
See the product's help file for detailed explanation of what "unmanaged" memory is and how to access and use it with RamDisk Plus 11.
Looking through the help file it appears they have a driver that forces PAE on for extra address space used exclusively for the RAMdisk- of course your hardware needs to support this.
Unlocking PAE mode still won't enable additional system RAM address space accessible to Windows though, because all your kernel mode drivers need to be PAE aware which is very unlikely for the vast majority of users... but I can see how this might make sense for a RAM disk using its own driver.
Read here for more info about PAE in windows :
http://www.dansdata.com/io090.htmI still recommend just upgrading to 64 bit windows though
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