hey people i have a laptop ...i am running a pentium 3 700mhz....with 256MB of memory....the performance was ok, but noww when i made a diff partition of 1.5GB and made it my page or cache folder...MY COMPUTER IS SUPER FASSTTTT..TRYYY IT PEOPLE ITS WORTHED.....YOUR HARD DRIVE WONT MAKE THOSE REDUNDENT CRACKING SOUND ANYMORE..well jsut less and u'll eaisly noitice HOW FAST UR COMP CAN GET.

I can only assume that your previous single partition was highly fragmented which has a knock on effect of reducing the effeciency of the paging/swap file. Doing what you have done is a good way of keeping this file in an unfragmented area although 1.5Gb just for the file is possibly a tad oversized IMHO, unless of course you have set the file with a minimum size of about 1Gb on initialization with a maximum of 1.4Gb. Also, if you have a second HDD which has better performance then switching the paging file to this HDD will also speed performance. HTH

using a second hard-drive will significantly improve performance...but do remember i am using a laptop here..i dont wanan be carrying around a second hard-drive for just a page file :-)

Try this place http://www.totallyawesome.com/ . This guy does it. He's alittle nutty, and claims to have the fastest computers on the planet. He has many locations in Utah and only Utah. Haven't seen them anywhere else. There's even a website http://www.superdellsucks.com/ thats dedicated to the owner, and it's all anti.

Check out mine. GreatStuffCheap.net

Hey rumpole, nice idea I'd like to try it. You left out one small detail: HOW. Give us poor newbies a clue. Unless you think it's over our heads that is. Thanks, Bob B :roll:

Hi,

I think what Nick was trying to tell is you that you only have (1) ONE spindle in your laptop. Creating a 2nd partition for your pagefile can only be helpful in avoiding fragmentation. However, the read and write circuitry and heads must still be allocated as if there were only (1) partition. Nick also made the correct suggestion that a 2nd hard drive, spindle, will, in fact, speed up the operations. However, all the laptops I've seen only have a single internal hard drive and additional ones must be external, which Rumpole doesn't want to bother with.

Defragmenting your hard disk would be/would have been just as effective.

HTH.

Hey, guys, this is a good thread. I think I even understood it and that's saying a lot. It is really nice to see a thread with all "newbies" talking to each other. Join us more often please. From: a former professional newbie.......... 8)

I personally don't like using logical partitions. Let's just say I've had experiences which give me good reasons for this stand and leave it at that. If you are running NTFS, there is really nothing to be gained by partitioning a drive anyway.

Here is how to tweak the most performance out of your single-drive setup:

First, disable your paging file altogether. Windows will warn you of the impending apocalypse, but worry not. Unless you are running many more start-up applications than anyone should, 256MB of RAM is sufficient to boot Windows XP.

Then go into the tools menu of any folder and click on "folder options." Enable viewing of all hidden and system files. Windows will again warn you of dire consequences. Ignore it. Find "pagefile.sys" and delete it. You read right! DELETE IT!

Now, run the defrag utility. Go to lunch. It will take some time.

Finally, go and re-create your paging file (the pagefile.sys I just asked you to delete). Set both minimum and maximum size to be the same. With 256MB of RAM onboard, I would not set it any larger than about 256MB, unless I planned to run a high-resolution scanner or something that might want to write a huge amount of temporary data into the paging file or something. In any case, making it larger than 384MB is a total waste.

Now, you have a defragmented drive with a fresh defragmented paging file that will STAY defragmented.

The reason I had you delete the pagefile.sys file before running the defrag utility is because Microsoft's defrag utility won't defrag the paging file. At least older versions wouldn't. So I delete it and create it afresh. If it's set to a fixed size, Windows won't fragment it again.

A side bonus of a fixed-size paging file, besides less HD gnashing and grinding, is fewer processor cycles wasted in "managing" how large the dynamic paging file is to be from one moment to the next. Windows then just uses it when required, but otherwise leaves it alone. If you've got a 2+GHz Pentium 4 under the hood, paging file management overhead is a trivial matter, but with a much slower processor such as yours, every processor cycle not doing actual productive work (even - especially - if that "work" is something like QuakeIII ) is a waste that should be avoided as much as possible.