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Gary D. said:
This has probably been asked before...
I've just installed XP Home on a multi-partition drive and I
would
like to relocate the Swap File to its own partition - V:
(Virtual
Memory).
How can I achieve this?
This is not a good idea, and can hurt your 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 swap 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 doing what doing this may
be slight, since you won't use the page file much, but it won't
help you.
Also, the other problem with a separate partition like this is
that you run the risk of making it too small, in which case
programs will fail for lack of virtual memory, or too large,
which is wasteful of disk space. If you leave it on C:, it can
expand or contract as needed.
