Re: Keeping the swapfile in a separate partition

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: alegator (larry2002_at_argentina.com)
Date: 12/26/04 

Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 17:28:28 -0300

Ken, I got this answer from a friend of mine who is a Software Engineer at
GM:

"Hi Ale, I would really love to have a face to face chat with some of
these Microsoft Engineers and question them and find out how much do
they really know, the reason you set the minimum equal to the maximum
is to keep the pagefile together in one space so it dosent start
looking for other space to use on the hard drive, letting a pagefile
grow and shrink will fragment a hard drive like a shrapnel grenade not
to mention Windows can a will make mistakes by sometimes placing pieces
the paged file out side of your allotted area and the only way to fix
that is to have a separate partition for the pagefile, Windows OS works
like a pig the more you feed it the more it will eat, with Windows the
more Ram you put in the more it will use, there are ways to restrict
Windows from using to much ram and it requires very in-depth registry
editing and knowledge of hexadecimal editing, if you make a separate
partition of 4 gig and set the minimum to 4gig and the max to 4 gig you
will have contained the fragmentation problem windows gives and plenty
of room for ram to dump unused files to pagefile, as for the Microsoft
Engineer, he sould of asked you many more questions before recommending
you run a 200 mg pagefile as I wish I could have chatted with him so I
can yell at him, Microsoft considers most home users as average users
and will offer advice based on the average user in order to keep their
asses out of hot water and they will not get into architecture of
Windows because he most likely does not know architecture of Windows
and to find that out you must go to their high level support and pay
alot of money for that support.
If you do setup a separate partition and decide to make it 4 gig the
partition must have 15% usable space left on it as you will get disk
warnings all the time if you dont, such as 3450 megs min and 3450 max,
just go to your defragmenter and make sue it says 15% free space."

"Ken Blake" <kblake@this.is.an.invalid.domain> wrote in message
news:eTDDLGs6EHA.3376@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> In news:u%23aNdxr6EHA.4040@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl,
> alegator <larry2002@argentina.com> typed:
>
>> I've read that you can increase Windows performance by keeping the
>> swapfile in a separate partition.
>
>
> Sorry, but you've read wrong. This is not a good idea, and can hurt your
> performance rather than improving it,. 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 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.
>
>
> --
> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
> Please reply to the newsgroup
>
>
>> I can easily create an extended
>> partition using say Partition Magic, but then how do I tell Windows
>> to assign the swapfile to that new partition? Thanks.
>
>

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