partitioning a new hard dirve

[Jody]

We just bought a 30gig HD that i will be putting into our Dell 500 with 768 MB mem. i am running win 98. i am wondering what advantage there is to partitioning it to make a swap drive out of part of it and how much? Also how do i make windows use the partitioned drive as the swap drive?

 

Forgot to say thanks (the boss interrupted me)

Thanks

Jody

[ 08-01-2001: Message edited by: jagourley ]

[Bullines]

It's generally a good idea to give the Windows swap file its own partition. Keeping it on its own partition will prevent fragmentation from other data (Windows, Mastercam, misc files, etc...) from creeping in. Swap file performance will be marginally better since it won't share the same routine disk activity. Also, if you have more than one drive, it's a good idea to put the swap partition on the faster drive.

To answer your second question...

When setting Virtual Memory settings in Windows 98, you can specify which partition you'd like to keep the swap file on.

Hope this helps.

[Bullines]

I didn't notice that you asked "how much" until now. There are tons of different advices regarding the size of a swap file. The most common one is 1.5 times the size of the amount of RAM you have. That one is a pretty safe guide, but I tend to use another one. I use a utility, such as the Windows 2000 Task Manager, to keep an eye on my RAM usage while I open and use apps that I normally simultaneously use and note how much RAM is needed. I then set my swap file size to that amount. Just keep in mind, allocating too much swap file space can hurt performance. Hope this helps

[ 08-01-2001: Message edited by: Bullines ]

[Jody]

Thanks Bullines,

I have not put a HD in before, i will be attempting it today.

Jody