I am installing a second (d:) Hard Drive on my computer, I was wondering if moving the swap file to a seperate drive, would I increase my performance? FPS?Thanks!Barry

I doubt you will see any difference. I made a separate partition (3.0GB) on my drive for the swap file when I installed WinXP. It has never used anywhere near the 3.0GB for swapping. I didn't make a separate partition on my wife's computer, same MOBO, processor, RAM, etc. Flight Simulator runs the same on both units.The real trick is computer maintenance by emptying your temporary files under Internet Explorer and Disk Cleanup.W. Sieffert

I beleive it has to be a seperate physical drive, not another partition on the same hard drive.Barry

There may be some benefit if you keep the swapfile on a separate partition (not physical drive). However if you have a good defrag program (like PerfectDisk) that takes care of the swapfile and you keep the file at a fixed size there should be no difference.I used a 1GB swapfile when I was playing X-Plane a lot (real memory hog). I have it at 768MB now but I could probably get away with 512MB. Total memory usage with FS9 can go as high as 700+MB so your total memory needs to be something like that (if you have 512MB you need about 200-250MB absolute minimum, with 1GB you probably don't need a swapfile).You should place the swapfile (and ideally the OS and games and programs you frequently use) on the faster harddrive. If you don't know which is the fastest, use Sandra 2005 @ http://www.sisoftware.net/ to benchmark them.

Well, I placed the Page File (swap file) on the seperate drive, I see no real improvement. So unless I have the size set incorrectly, the standard is 1.5 times the amount of internal RAM (768 MB), so my range is 1000MB min and 2300MB max.Looking for more suggestions :)Barry

Hi Barry,I think the answers you have received so far say it all. With Windows XP and if you have, say, 1GB of physical memory installed, I doubt whether there is anything to be gained by moving the paging file to another partition/drive.I have a 10 gig partition for XP + Virtual Memory (the paging file) 1535MB - Windows recommendation - and everything runs just fine with no noticeable performance change from the time I had the paging file on a separate drive.Also, as another poster suggested, I would strongly recommend you consider Perfect Disk as a superb long term Disk defragmenting alternative to Windows Defragmenter. It is very efficient and quick and does a much better job than the Windows XP module. It will, amongst many other things defrag the paging file.Mike

I had my paging/swap file on a separate physical drive for ages. When I contacted Microsoft support to try to clear up some bad memory leakage problems when running FS9.1, they suggested that I move the paging file back to the main Windows partition. I haven't noticed much difference now that I have done so - I think in future I would keep the page file on the same partition as the XP installation as I doubt that in practice there is any real advantage to doing otherwise. What may slightly improve performance however is to install FS9 itself into a partition on the second hard drive (but it must be a second physical drive, not a different partition on the same drive as Windows, as pointed out above). Of course this advice is only of use when you next do a fresh FS9 installation!!Martin