Another Way To Optimize Your Swap File Mar 28 '01    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Network Storage LaCie 2big 6 TB Hard Drive From $715 Hewlett Packard ProLiant DL380 G5 (AG818A) 750 GB Network Storage Server From $54 The Bottom Line As you load and unload applications, the amount of virtual memory needed for them changes, which causes Windows to change the swap file size. I just read a review about optimizing the windows swap file by moving it to its separate dedicated partition. There is another (much easier)way to eliminate swap file fragmentation. This method is being used by Norton Utilities to optimize one's PC. It also doesn't allow Windows to waste time for swap file resizing. The following method mostly applies to Windows 95. WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT? If you run several applications at one time on your “Windows-equipped” PC, they may (and probably will) require more physical memory (RAM) than your PC has. For example, your computer may have 64 Mb of RAM, but your applications may need 80 Mb. In this case Windows creates a “swap file”, storing there part of information that otherwise would have to be located in physical memory (RAM). This way your PC has the ability to facilitate more than it can fit into physical memory. It is called “virtual memory”. In case if you need 80 Mb of total memory, Windows will store 64 Mb in Ram and remaining 80-64=16 Mb on the hard drive in the “swap file”, creating total of 64+16=80 Mb of “virtual memory”. Windows constantly swap information between “swap file” and RAM, it slows down your PC, that’s why generally the more RAM you get the better. As you load and unload applications, the amount of virtual memory needed for them changes, which causes Windows to change the swap file size. It is time consuming and slows your PC down significantly. Also because of this constant change in file size, the file may (and will) become fragmented – the parts of the file will be located in different parts of your hard drive, so the magnetic heads, that read and write information will have to “travel” a lot, which in turn slows your PC down (again). To avoid all these “slow downs” you can do the following. Go to "Start" - "Control Panel" - "System" and on "Performance" tab switch from something like "Allow Windows to adjust my swap file size" to "Set swap file size manually". Then set swap file size to a specific size (see below). After that, reboot and defragment your hard drive. It is better to use specialized utilities like Norton Speed Disk or Nuts&Bolts’ Disk Minder, which put the swap file in the “beginning” of the disk, so the magnetic heads do not have to travel much. This will eliminate swap file fragmentation and doesn't allow Windows to waste time for swap file resizing. Use common sense in choosing the swap file size. it is recommended to set the swap file size to about 4 times of you RAM capacity, but if you don't do much video/image editing, you can do with much less. In my case (Win95, 96 Mb of RAM), Norton Utilities set the swap file size to 100Mb, and when I check the swap file utilization, it stays below 1 Mb. Your results may vary, depending on your OS, amount of RAM in your system and applications you use. You can watch your swap file utilization using "System Monitor" of Windows95, or "Task Manager" of Win NT 4.0 and determine how much you need to add to the swap file size so that it can handle all the applications you load in memory.

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