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This is not the best way to goAug 04 '00 Write an essay on this topic.This review was origionally written to disagree with an opinion of gr8ful's. As such there is no information here (yet) about partitioning a hard drive. The only reason this review is here is because there is no more appropriate category for it to be placed into. im sorry, but I don't think gr8tful's reccomended procedures should be followed as stated. At least he knows that the swapfile should be really large and limiting it would cause problems. He failed to mention utilities such as partition magic that can allow you to resize and make new partitions without formatting. Besides that, getting a new hard drive for the swap file (optional i know yes) or setting aside a gig for swap when it normally doesn't get that large is not usually worthwhile. If your computer has so little ram that increasing virtual memory speed noticably increases overal system performance, then it's better to have more ram and/or optimize what ram you have. It would make the computer much faster to optimize cache instead because windows will use ram for caching files until there is not enough space for programs and will then use virtual memory instead of eliminating the cache. For my 128 mb ram system, windows will have allocated about 50mb for cache upon startup left to its own devices, and will allocate more as time goes on. I fixed this by limited cache by editing the file c:\windows\system.ini under the heading vcache, i entered a line that said maxfilecache=8096 This limited cache to 8 megs of ram. Although this may slow acess to frequently used files that are larger than 8 megs, the overall system speedup was quite large, leaving me with huge chunks of free memory at startup which can then be used for programs and data. This optimization works best for systems with at least 128 mb of ram, since systems with less generally don't have enough ram to allocate much for cache anyway. The amount of cache memory can be fiddled with too, since if you use a lot of the same big files often, you may want more, and if you use a lot of different files once per session, you would probably not get much benefit with having more. Systems with more ram should of course get more cache memory allocated. In conclusion, with the preceding tip, users with at least 96 or 128 mb ram or so can get much faster system performance simply by avoiding virtual memory almost altogether. For users with less than this much ram, virtual memory optimization would work to your benefit, as would using win95 instead of 98 or 2000, and using internet explorer 4 instead of 5. Really the best solution for users with 64 mb ram or less is to get more ram, but we can't always afford that.  |
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