I have 2 GB of memory. I read that with >1 GB of memory, disabling the swap file may speed things up. my eliminating the need to access the hard drive based swap file.I notice that the memory does often go unused.Has anyone tried this or know if it will work, or create any problems?ThanksGreg

From all I've heard, disabling swap does little to nothing when it comes to performance - in fact, some programs/games *require* a swap file, even if you have more than enough headroom with physical memory. I did experiment with this, and noticed that there was no benefit to disabling the swap file in my 2GB system... so I turned it back on due to the potential for problems. A potentially better plan would be to invest in another hard drive (7600 RPM or better) and move your swap file to it - this way, any system required swap accesses will not interfere with any primary drive accesses. Just having the swap and the primary on separate partitions of one drive isn't enough - it's the same read/write head having to move around to access it... a different physical drive is needed for any gains to be realized. I am toying with that idea for my future system builds - a RAID0 stripe array of SATA drives for speed and storage, plus a single fast IDE drive to hold the swap file, as well as act as a destination for daily backups (in case the RAID stripe goes kaput!) -Greg #2.

You'll always have a swapfile Greg. WinXP requires it. When you "disable" the pagefile what actually happens is that the system will use physical memory for the swap space instead of the HDD. Will it improve performance? Maybe. Try it and see. Nothing lost. With 2GB you shouldn't get an out-of-memory error unless you are using many complex add-ons. And even then it's not a real problem - just reset the pagefile to the HDD as before.Doug

Thanks so much for the reply!Greg

Been without a pagefile for over a year. Using 2 gigs of ram is enough - NO problems.....maybe even faster.Abe