thinkink
Solid State Member
- Messages
- 16
- Location
- Americas heartland
1 important note...
The swap file trick only works on a "separate" HD, don't confuse this with a separate "partition" on the same physical drive or you'll gain nothing for the effort. If the process or reasoning sounds confusing search the web for "tweak + move page file" etc. and you'll quickly understand the benefits.
ZDNet has an article on this but they actually recommend using an old HD you might have laying around. Whoever wrote that article should be slapped. Why would you want to move your Paging file to a slower HD? Defeats the whole purpose of the tweak!
The swap file trick only works on a "separate" HD, don't confuse this with a separate "partition" on the same physical drive or you'll gain nothing for the effort. If the process or reasoning sounds confusing search the web for "tweak + move page file" etc. and you'll quickly understand the benefits.
With SATA drive - Why would you want to keep the "IDE Hard Drive @ 5,400 RPM"?
If you share the same IDE cable for both 5400 rpm and the 7200 RPM the performance of the faster will be downgraded to the slower HD speed.
I like the idea of having the 7200 rpm as the master/single drive on IDE port - use it as your backup/storage drive.
Move everything you want off that drive, hard format it, pull it out and donate it to someone with an older system, "or" put away somewhere as an emergency backup "just in case" the 7200 should fail when your too broke to replace it.
When money permits, get another SATA so you can put your Page file and temp folders on that 2nd SATA for even greater performance. With 2Gig or more of Ram you don't need much of a Page file anyway - the few times(if any) that the OS calls on it, the Page file will respond quicker.
With 2Gig ram and WinXP - I run a custom size Page file setting of 500 - 500 on a 2nd drive, when I defrag main drive I don't have a bloated page file in the mix. Makes for a clean main HD, and in my case, noticeably snappier system.
ZDNet has an article on this but they actually recommend using an old HD you might have laying around. Whoever wrote that article should be slapped. Why would you want to move your Paging file to a slower HD? Defeats the whole purpose of the tweak!