Hugh Sutherland said:
this may not be the best newsgroup for this but here goes
I want to put my pagefile(swapfile) on a second hard drive. Should that
pagefile be on a NTFS or FAT32 partition? also would it make sense to
make
a hidden partition (no drive letter) say max 4096MB atthe staert or the
end
of the second harddrive?
If you have enough RAM - turn off the page file facility completely. Windows
XP (for one) will use a swapfile whether it needs to or not (despite what
you may read elsewhere), so from time-to-time, it will degrade performance
by a few percent. It uses the swapfile so that there is always plenty of RAM
available, however it doesn't know how much RAM you are 'about' to need, so
errs on the side of caution.
NB - only turn off your swapfile if you have plenty of RAM. A fair goal
would be to never use more than about 75% with everything open that you
could ever need. If you have no swap file and you do fill the RAM, then
either the application, or more likely, the entire operating system will
crash and lose data.
Applications that require lots of RAM include photo editing, video
manipulation and any kind of multimedia or gaming application.
If you do decide to use a swapfile, then make it a good size - at least the
same size as your physical RAM and make it a fixed size, or a large minimum
size, to avoid fragmentation of the file. A few years ago the recommended
size for the swapfile used to be 1.5x the amount of RAM.
An aside - does anyone know the following: If Windows XP can only address
4GB of RAM, then in a system with 2GB of physical RAM, is there any point
making a swapfile larger than 2GB - would it ever be used over the 'total'
4GB point?
