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SWAP File Setup on XP

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I am doing a fresh formatting, partitioning and installation of XP on a new 80 G HD. I want to set up several partitions. In particular, I want to isolate the windows swap file on its own partition, separate from the rest of the OS.Can anyone suggest how I might instruct XP to put the swap file on drive "D" (a 5 GIG partition). Or, could someone suggest a technical help document I might be able to download?? Thanks!!John-PaulToronto

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Go to Control Panel, then to Performance and Maintenance, then click on System. Go to the Advanced tab. There, click the Settings button of the Performance section. Go to the Advanced tab of the window that's now open. Click on the Change button in the Virtual Memory section, and there you can select which drive/partition to use.__________________________________________________________EricList of all airlines, aircraft manufacturers and aircraft types recognised by ATC:http://www.geocities.com/eric_2203/orhttp://ftp.avsim.com/library/esearch.php?D...atID=fs2002misc

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John-Paul,Unfortunately there's little to be gained in moving the swap file to a separate partition whilst that partition remains on the same physical hard drive where Windows is installed.You need to add a second hard drive and assign the swap file to that drive. Benefits are only gained when the heads of the swap file drive are physically separate to those where Windows is installed. If everything stays on one physical drive it's impossible for the heads to be in two places at once.Regards,


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
Cheadle Hulme Weather

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Well that is not entirely true Ray. One benefit of keeping a swap file in a separate partition is it will not fragment if it is the only file in that part.So...while seek issues cannot be addressed in this fashion, fragmentation can.http://www.pcguide.com/opt/opt/osSwapLocation-c.htmlThis is but one source on this topic that can be easily found with a google search.Cheers,bt

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Hi Braun,I tend to agree with Ray here. The problem I see with such a setup is the seek time actually deteriorates quite a bit. The pagefile partition will most likely end up at the outer most tracks while Windows itself will most likely be on the inner most tracks. Because of the high latency of hard drives, I'm sure this would actually perform worse in most circumstances (although I haven't done swap/pagefile performance tests since the early 9x days).If there were constant seeks only within the swap partition (such as heavy video/image editing, etc), I can see how it'd be beneficial. But since that isn't the normal pattern for swap usage the system would most likely be worse off. If someone wanted to minimize fragmentation of the pagefile, a better solution would be to create a fixed size pagefile then use a defragger that can handle the pagefile such as Norton SpeedDisk or DiskKeeper (the built-in lite version of Executive Software's DiskKeeper in XP does not).With the improvements of defragmentation on NTFS 5.1 and XPs ability to defrag upon startup however, even this shouldn't be necessary. People can do what they wish of course, but with todays systems I don't see much benefit unless the pagefile is located on a wholly separate drive.Take care, http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

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Well hey Elrond, I agree with Ray too:>So...while seek issues cannot be addressed in this fashion, fragmentation can.As to where the pagefile ends up, that would be addressed in the initial setup. If you took a 60 Gig drive, parted 5 Gigs for OS, 5 Gigs for swap, and 25/25 for apps, the 5-gig part would be located next door to the OS partition, and would not end up at the outer tracks as you suggested. The setup I describe would be very effective at keeping seek latency between OS and swap to a minimum in my opinion. Where you would be more likely to see this occur would be in a single part single drive setup. In that case the swap would likely migrate out as more and more apps were added and especially as the swap "grew"But in the end, as I have stated before in other swap file threads, "Microsoft recommends the swap file be placed on a separate drive for best performance. No argument there. OTOH, 90% of home users have a Single Drive/Single Part setup.Cheers,btPS...as to your suggestions for the SS. For most of them, I had "been there, done that", thanks anyways. I did try your suggestion of killing ACPI. That intreged me as I just recently had to do this at the office based on a vendors 2nd level support instructions to help us resolve a com port issue with a software gadget to talk to PLC's. Unfortuneately, it did not go as easily with XP as it did with the 2k boxes at the office. In fact, in many ways, it effectively killed my pc. No problem there as I had an image (love that Power Quest DI 2002) and in 5 minutes all was back to as before! :)Any other ideas? I'm going to try ACPI/Standard PC again this weekend, but in the meantime, speak up!...two heads are indeed better than one!

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Greetings Bruce and Elrond,You boys are going in a lot deeper than my fairly basic knowledge but we seem to be heading towards a common goal on separate parallel tracks :-)There's one thing no-one has mentioned yet and that's the amount of physical memory installed. With 512Mb commonplace and some having up to 1Gb maybe only a very small part of the swap file is being used? If, as we are always being told, we close all other applications before launching FS, how much use is being made of the swap file? XP certainly manages memory a lot more efficiently than Win9x and with 512Mb installed I still have some 150Mb+ of free memory after FS is loaded. Over a long flight that will almost certainly be eaten into but as to whether I need a 700Mb fixed swap file is debatable?I have to hold my hand up here and admit to having a fixed swap file of 700Mb even though I doubt it's of much use compared to letting Windows manage it :-hmmm


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
Cheadle Hulme Weather

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Hey Braun,You are right of course. If setup as you suggest instead of the way I was envisioning, latency wouldn't be much if any of an issue. And it would keep the pagefile defragged. I still don't think theres much of a need for such a setup with todays systems, but at least it wouldn't have the pitfalls I described. Thanks Braun.As for the screensaver issue: I'm sorry to hear that. The only other thing I can think of is to disable all ACPI functions from with the BIOS as well (ie: set it to Non-Plug and Play OS or the like). If its not ACPI or bground processing related, I can't think what it might be. Hard to do when you can't see the system first hand of course. I'll do a few searches on the net tonight if I can and see if I can dig something else up.Take care,http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

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Hi Ray,Well XP is a nasty beast in this particular instance. Regardless of the memory installed in an XP system, it will page part of itself to the pagefile. If a system has 512MB or less, I wouldn't recommend disabling the pagefile. But if, as you say, a system has 1GB or more as is increasingly common, I absolutely would disable all pagefile use (and do on my system when not doing heavy graphics or video work). Some games and apps can't stand this either and will balk if a pagefile doesn't exist however. Yet one more nitpick thing I wish MS would fix. :-(As for your situation with a fixed swap, there's certainly nothing wrong with that per-se. Indeed, if you own a good XP based defrag utility, the pagefile will be kept defragmented (and moved to the innermost sectors on your drive if chosen). This can produce some slight performance improvement in heavy usage situations. Normally I don't explicitly recommend someone do so, but again, theres absolutely nothing wrong with it. And it may provide usefull if you are into heavy video editing and the like.Take care, http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

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Hey guys... thanks for all the info! I am actually going to be using 2 separate physical drives. I will have my OS (WinXP) located on a 30G drive. I also have an 80G drive using an 8MB cache (Western Digital Caviar) which will house all my sims, music, etc. What if I put the OS on the 30G drive and created a partition of maybe 3G on the 80G drive and loacted the swap file there? I would also make it the first partition on the drive. Does that make any sense??Thanks!!!John-PaulToronto

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Hi Braun,Go search tweakxp.com (the forum there) for references on how to disable ACPI without needing to re-install XP. I was having all that trouble with my (second) bad RAM stick when I built this system a month ago, and had looked at ACPI as a possible culprit (always looking for the hardest thing!). ACPI is, indeed it seems, responsible for a lot of things in XP that appear wierd.Bruce.

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Thank you Bruce. The death of my PC I described, came precisely from the subsequent reinstall of the OS caused by the remuneration of the PC changing the ACPI category (ACPI compliant to standard PC)Thanks again, I will go look.bt

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Hi Elrond,<>I will bear that in mind should I upgrade my RAM - thanks for the confirmation.<>I only use the default XP defrag utility and it always tells me that my drive(s) don't need defragging. I am a little suspicious of this but then again, XP is more sophisticated than Win9x so perhaps it isn't required that often. But, if you can recommend a good (preferably freeware) utility I'm all ears :-)Cheers,


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
Cheadle Hulme Weather

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Hi John-Paul,Looks like a sound plan to me. Having the pagefile on a separate drive from Windows will give you increased performance in heavy swap situations. Or you could put Windows and your pagefile on the smaller drive then all your apps and the data they create on the larger. This would probably be more effective.Good luck, http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

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Hi Ray,While I can't think of a good freeware utility offhand, I can recommend both Norton SpeedDisk and Executive Software's DiskKeeper. I personally prefer SpeedDisk myself (although its packaged as Norton Utilities and Norton System Works, the only other useful software in that package is Norton Anti-virus. I definitely wouldn't install anything else in those packages as they are all resource hogs - in my opinion).As for freeware alternatives, I haven't spent any time looking for any so its possible there are some good ones out there. Maybe someone else can recommend one?Take care,http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

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