My coding platform is a Vista machine with 4GB RAM. And while the machine is slick, I know there are 800MB of RAM that is not used at all. (only about 3.2GB or 4GB is used).
can I installed something to help my platform for coding? I think Wubi will not be able to use those RAM, but VMware or VirtualPC might be? Or a RAM disk so that downloading and installing tools with big file to unzip can be a lot faster? (such as unzipping Ruby installation files which seems like it is 17,000 files to unzip -- maybe exaggerating)
The upper 500MB-1GB of RAM is reserved for Windows and device drivers on 32 bit Windows. It varies in size by a number of factors but the largest is the amount of RAM your graphics card has as this amount will generally be reserved from the top of the 32 bit address space. The only way to use that is to install a 64 bit operating system (eg Vista 64 bit). Virtualization won't help you because the memory isn't there for you to give to guest OSs.