Well... I did it!!!! I finally built my new machine!! I decided to locate my OS (WinXP Home) on one physical drive and place my swap file on a second drive within its own 3G partition. Tyhe question I have is whether to let WinXP manage its size or to set minimum and maximum settings myself? The default after installing WinXP was "custom size" of 768-1536 MB. I have no idea why my system chose these numbers but I have kept that setup only placing the swap file on the other drive. Any suggestions at all??By the way my performance is better than I was even anticipating!New system:Athlon XP 2000+ASUS A7V333 MBO512 MB Kingmax DDR RAM PC 2700IBM Deskstar 30G HDWD Caviar 80 G HD w 8MB cachestill using my GeForce2GTS 64 MB card for nowThanks for any help guys!John-PaulToronto

Windows manages mine. Never had any probs. Doesn't seem touse swap file much.XP Home P4 1.7 64mgGeforce2 Pro 512 Rambus Dram 30g HDPeter Sydney Australia

Hi John-Paul,there's lots of useful information in this article: http://www.pcguide.com/opt/opt/osSwapLocation-c.html(Thanks to Braun Tacon for bringing it to my attention.)Hope you find it useful,Cheers,Gosta

J-P, I'd set it to a fixed size (I use 512/512) just to stop any possibility of fragmentation. But with 512MB of physical RAM you won't be hitting the swap file enough for it to really matter. You can do it either way and never notice the difference. Trip