I finally moved my Win swap file; will I be sorry as long as I live?

[Bossy Monkey]

I'm trying to play a game for which I just barely cover the system requirements. It has been extremely frustrating, and I have been treated to the quick-clicking noise that says the system is working too hard untold times. Sooooooo I looked up on the 'net how to move the swap file. Early returns are mixed: on the one hand, the game (and the computer generally) seemed to run faster; on the other, it crashed after a half hour or so of play. (It also did that periodically before. It's a used game, and the cd is in kinda nasty shape, so it might just be a function of that.) On the other other other hand, nothing so dire as Windows was threatening ("ARE YOU SURE? YOU MIGHT NEVER BE ABLE TO TURN THE COMPUTER ON AGAIN?") occurred, so at least that's something.

Anyway, what are folks' experiences with moving the swap file? My computer arrived with a partitioned hard drive, the C: with 8 gigs and the D: with 20. I moved the swap file to the larger.

[nextbillgates]

1. Moving the swap file has little effect....

if you're moving it to a partition on the same drive.

For best swap performance, you want your swap file to be:

a) The same size for both min and max
b) On a separate physical hard drive not accessed often
c) On it's own dedicated partition formatted with FAT32 in 4K clusters
d) As close to the front of the drive as possible if on a separate drive, or as close to the rest of your data as possible if it must be on the same drive.

However, even if your swap file is as optimized as can be, it's still going to be slow. If you find that your drive is thrashing like crazy, the only way you're really going to improve performance is by disabling as many startup programs and services as possible, and if all else fails, by getting more memory. Computers these days aren't happy with anything less than 512MB of RAM.

[Bossy Monkey]

3. Three plays and three crashes later...

I think I'm going to go back to letting Windows manage memory. I think the biggest problem (apart from just not having enough memory) was that I didn't have enough blank space on the smaller drive, so I'll uninstall some things and move others to D: and see if that helps.

By the way, I mispoke above; I'm reasonably sure that they are in fact separate drives, not partitions. It's a Sony Vaio desktop rebuilt and resold by them. (Can you tell that I'm a technopeasant?)

[roguevalley]

2. sure. :-D what's a win file? :-D