Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rod Gayford
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R

Rod Gayford

I changed my swap drive from my C drive to my D drive (partitions on a
single disk) and the following folder appeared on my desk top after I
completed the change: %SystemDrive%. Can any one tell me why this folder
appeared and would it matter if I deleted it from my desktop, or could I
move the folder elsewhere?

Thanks in advance

Rod Gayford
 
Rod

What do you mean by "swap drive"? Are you meaning your pagefile? How did
you make this change?

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I think it was useless to move your swapfile........its still on the same
drive....no improvement in performance.
peter
 
I think it was useless to move your swapfile........its still on the same
drive....no improvement in performance.
Click to expand...


No, it's worse than useless. It will, if anything, *degrade*
performance.

What it does is move the page file to a location on the hard drive
distant from the other frequently-used data on the drive. The result
is that every time Windows needs to use the page file, the time to get
to it and back from it is increased.

Putting the page file on a second *physical* drive is a good idea,
since it decreases head movement, but not to a second partition on a
single drive. A good rule of thumb is that the page file should be on
the most-used partition of the least-used physical drive. For almost
everyone with a single drive, that's C:.

If you have enough RAM, the penalty for moving the page file to a
second partition may be slight, since you won't use the page file
much, but it won't help you.
 
I was getting a bit short of space on the 1st partition so moved the page
file to the 2 nd partition where there is plenty of room. Haven't noticed
any change in performance. But still what is the %SystemDrive%.??? Just
out of curiosity.

Cheers

Rod Gayford
 
Rod

How did you make this change?

How large is your C partition and how much free space does it have? How
large is the pagefile? There may be a better way to achieve extra free
space.

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
No, it's worse than useless. It will, if anything, *degrade*
performance.
Click to expand...

Doesn't that depend on which is the busier of the two partitions?
Granted, this is almost certain to be the C: partition, but if the D:
partition were for some reason the busier of the two, then moving the
pagefile to D: is the conventional wisdom.

This is one reason why I don't partition my drives - because a drive
partitioned into two will nearly always spend more time seeking than
with the same data on the unpartitioned drive, especially if you
defragment the drives with a program that amalagamates the free space
(the Windows defragmenter does not do this, at least not the ones up to XP).
 
Doesn't that depend on which is the busier of the two partitions?
Click to expand...


Yes. However...

Granted, this is almost certain to be the C: partition, but if the D:
partition were for some reason the busier of the two, then moving the
pagefile to D: is the conventional wisdom.
Click to expand...


....for all practical purposes you can consider that the partition that
Windows is installed on will almost always be the busiest partition on
that drive. For almost everyone, that's C:.
 
So you have a single drive with one partition and backup to a CD or DVD?


--
Regards.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
...for all practical purposes you can consider that the partition that
Windows is installed on will almost always be the busiest partition on
that drive. For almost everyone, that's C:.
Click to expand...

My music library is on D: and according to Process Explorer, Windows
Media Player is averaging 3,200 I/O's per second. I'm not sure that I
believe that number (can a USB connected drive sustain such data rates?
It's not making enough sound to seem really busy) but that makes my D:
drive busier by far than the rest of my system combined. of course, WMP
may be doing the bulk of that I/O to the catalog, which is on C:, but it
doesn't have to be there.
 
So you have a single drive with one partition and backup to a CD or DVD?

I don't, but I would imagine that many people do. I have three hard
drives, backing up each other against media failure in a round-robin
fashion. I do occasional backups to DVD, but I cannot often be bothered.
I do most of my backups to a couple of different remote backup systems
(my departmental server in my employers datacentre, and MOZY). The
departmental server has about eight levels of backup (it's rather
important to our business) so I'm comfortable with my arrangements.

I've suffered catastrophic drive failures a couple of times, but I still
have data going back to the 1970's
 
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