Questions about setting up a new computer

[John J. Boyer]

I've more or less decided to replacer my ten-year-old Linux machine. It 
is giving error messages intermittently. Most of them are about sector 
errors, but others seem to have nothing to do with the hard drive. It 
may be more and more troublesome, even if the hard drive is replaced. 
Besides, it would be nice to get more up-to-date hardware.

I'm thinking of getting 32 GB of ram. 8 GB will be for normal use. The 
other 24 GB will be in a ramdisk. Do I need a paging file? 8 GB of 
available ram should be more than enough. The paging file on my present 
machine always shows 0 usage, even with only 4 GB of ram. How do I avoid 
setting up a paging file during installation? I'm using Debian Jessie.

How do i set up the ramdisk? I want to assign the temp directory to it. 
It might be nice if the bin, sbin and usr directories were loaded onto 
it at boot-up.

Thanks,
John

-- 
John J. Boyer; President,
AbilitiesSoft, Inc.
Email: john.boyer at abilitiessoft.org
Website: http://www.abilitiessoft.org
Status: 501(C)(3) Nonprofit
Location: Madison, Wisconsin USA
Mission: To develop softwares and provide STEM services for people with 
         disabilities which are available at no cost.