Where can I find what should/must be on C drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ritter197
  • Start date Start date
Excellent advice! That' how I' ve always worked: C for System (OS and
Harware related programs), D for applications. On top, there is a dedicated
partition only for the page file. I make weekly an image (Acronis True
Image) of the C, and monthly a copy of the D. This working procedure results
in an image of +/- 3 GB instead of 8GB (takes some time to backup!), and I'
m sure XP works faster that way.
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I used to optimize for page files on every system, but these
days with a Gig of memory going for about $75-100, best to
install plenty of memory and just put a fixed minimum, no
max, 500MB pagefile (even that much is overkill if you have
a prudent amt. of ram) on the OS partition or outer tracks
of another drive, expecting to never use it for more than
windows' random ill-designed background swapping of a few
dozen MB - that never stops unless the swapfile is
completely turned off- though turning it off can help on
limited use, special funciton systems otherwise it can cause
crashing.

Another alternative is a ramdrive for the pagefile. I've
heard people make claims like "no benefit because it
could've used that memory _instead_ of paging in the first
place", but that isn't entirely true, Windows will write to
the pagefile even if you're only using half of the physical
memory in the system, you could have over 1GB of free memory
and windows will still be writing to the pagefile. IMO,
this is a design flaw, windows is designed to assume one
doesn't mind if it decides what it should be doing so far as
writing to drives, making ridiculous levels of I/O when the
system should've just went into sleep mode already.
 
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