Answer me this....

[FBM357]

Would adding another HD to my system and placing the swap file on it actually improve system performance? (in other words, use the slave drive for the swap/pagefile)

Also, I'm having problems with SP1 update. After installation on one of my machines (the others are operating fine), IE6 is crawling!!! I mean CRAWLING!!!! Yet, when I install all the critical updates prior to SP1 fix, the machine runs fine. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, said this is associated with an illegal serial number. Is there any validity to that statement? Otherwise, i'm going to uninstall (using GOBACK) and continue as before. I'm using a router as well as firewall in the form of software, so what, if any, risk would I be taking by not installing SP1?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

FBM

[phishhead]

you are correct about sp1 the corp(devilsown ) key has been black listed and will not work. as far as the swap drive what are the specs of the drive and your sys specs.

[egghead]

You should get the same performance from xp regardless of what serial numbers you are using.you seem to be having a conflict with one of your newer drivers. check for spyware before updating and after updateing and you should also restore explorer to defaults.

hope these suggestions help

egghead

[phishhead]

let me get this straight can you update to sp1...if not then its an illegal key. if you can then its something different.

[Big Booger]

About the swap file. What you suggested seems reasonable. But if you have a large HDD now, you can partition it, and put the swap file on the NON-OS partition. In my case I have a 60GB HDD partitioned into 2 parts, one 24 and one 36. The swap file is on the 36Gb partition.

Hope that helps.
BB

[SupaStar]

Originally posted by Big Booger
About the swap file. What you suggested seems reasonable. But if you have a large HDD now, you can partition it, and put the swap file on the NON-OS partition. In my case I have a 60GB HDD partitioned into 2 parts, one 24 and one 36. The swap file is on the 36Gb partition.

Hope that helps.
BB

However you should see (marginally) better performance using a separate drive as it has it's own set of read/write heads taking the load off your main drive.

I might give this a go since I have a spare drive lying around. :)

[egghead]

so if i stick a 2 gig hd in my computer it is going to fly like in the microsoft commercials?

[Big Booger]

Supastar is totally spot on. You will see slightly better performance with a separate drive. I wonder if anyone has benchmarked this and actually proven the performance gain of setting your PF on a separate drive as opposed to on a separate partition of the same HDD.

Would be interesting.
BB

[Dehcbad25]

What about this question, Is it better to distribute the PF over diferent drives??
I have 5 drives, and 3 have PF (all are different devices) that makes it slower than if I had all the PF in one drive?

[SupaStar]

Originally posted by Dehcbad25
What about this question, Is it better to distribute the PF over diferent drives??
I have 5 drives, and 3 have PF (all are different devices) that makes it slower than if I had all the PF in one drive?

I guess it would, but then I don't think the difference would be all that great. To my knowledge, more RAM (where possible) would be a better option.


Originally posted by Big Booger
I wonder if anyone has benchmarked this and actually proven the performance gain of setting your PF on a separate drive as opposed to on a separate partition of the same HDD.

If you can recommend a benchmark utility, I can test it out.

[SupaStar]

Confirming my earlier allegations...

From Elder Geek on Windows XP (http://www.theeldergeek.com/)


Since the paging file and operating system files are by default located on the same drive, concurrent access to both locations is impossible. One or the other has to wait, slowing down overall system performance. What can you do to minimize the delay? If your system only has one hard drive the best option is to pack the motherboard with as much RAM as possible to minimize paging file accesses.

If the operating system has more than one hard drive, place the paging file on a drive which does not contain the operating system files. A step up from placing the paging file on a separate drive is to place it on a dedicated drive. Even if you don't have a drive to dedicate solely to the paging file, placing it on a different drive that contains files which are not accessed frequently will help the performance issue.

If more than two hard drives are available, the paging file can be split among different drives. The more drives that are available to split the paging file across, the better the performance increase. Even though it's outside the scope of this article, paging files should not be placed on fault-tolerant drives because of the way data is written to them. It looks like 'the more paging files the better' corollary is applicable, and to a point that is true, with one major exception. Do not place more than one paging file on multiple partitions on a single physical hard disk. Performance will decrease because the drive heads perform sequential accesses to different locations on the drive rather than pulling the information from one contiguous location.

Finally, the temptation is always great when you have a RAM packed machine to totally eliminate the page file. Don't do it. By design, some components in Windows XP require the presence of a page file, even if they never use it for its intended purpose. You'll likely receive out of memory type errors if you eliminate all page files. Feel free to set the page file to the required minimum (2MB) if you have sufficient RAM, secure in the knowledge that XP won't access the page file unless it's absolutely needed, but again - don't eliminate it totally.

[Big Booger]

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_hdd.html

The benchmark for the page file would be cool. Thanks for the info. I learned something new today.
BB

[thedecentmale]

About the paging size... I did notice :cool: a considerable difference in access speed when I added another 5 GB hdd to my system running Win XP with SP1.. ( the HDD was almost free as I took it as a charge for installng Windows on a client's machine ;)
I transferred the entire PF from my primary HDD to secondary HDD and.. KABOOM!!!! my XP was flying ( using a slower flight engine than of MS commercials.. ) but nevertheless much faster...

[FBM357]

Originally posted by phishhead
let me get this straight can you update to sp1...if not then its an illegal key. if you can then its something different.

I've no problem updating to SP1 ... issue is ... IE6 IS SLOW AS ALL HELL!!!!:p (having this problem with 1 out of the 5 machines I own)

[FBM357]

Great! Now I have something to do with the spare drives I've laying around:D

[Dirk Diggler]

Usually the spare drives we have lying around are old (relative) and therefore slower, which in turn slows the Paging to and from the drive, which in turn slows your system down.
The Paging File should be on the fastest drive, preferably in the middle of the drive if short of RAM, or on the ouside edge if plenty of RAM.
If it is truly a spare drive set the minimum for the Paging File at the same amount of RAM and set the maximum as big as the drive.

[Stripe]

Man!!! I got to try this...I just placed a 120GB on my sys....

I'm gonna try a LARGE page file and see what happens ;)

[FBM357]

Originally posted by Dirk Diggler
Usually the spare drives we have lying around are old (relative) and therefore slower, which in turn slows the Paging to and from the drive, which in turn slows your system down.
The Paging File should be on the fastest drive, preferably in the middle of the drive if short of RAM, or on the ouside edge if plenty of RAM.
If it is truly a spare drive set the minimum for the Paging File at the same amount of RAM and set the maximum as big as the drive.

I've a spare 20 gig/7200 rpm drive that I'll use. Is this not sufficient?

[Dehcbad25]

I have no spare drives :( All five drives totaling 300GB are being used :p (no time to clean the junk out)
Anyway, I tried this and moved the page file to 3 drives, which are not in used generally, and I did see a gaining, but I didn't benchmark it:p

[Dirk Diggler]

FBM, I think a 20 gig Paging file is maybe a little on the extreme side of thinking, but hey if its doing nowt, do it.

[FBM357]

Originally posted by Dirk Diggler
FBM, I think a 20 gig Paging file is maybe a little on the extreme side of thinking, but hey if its doing nowt, do it.

LOL, I'm not using the entire drive for the page file. It's the smallest drive I have available... LOL (like a 32 waist trying on a pair of size 72 pants)

[Big Booger]

I tried this monster page file thing...
it would only let me set it to 4096MB... :(

Any ideas about that?

[Dirk Diggler]

That would be a FAT32 limitation, try using NTFS and see if you can up the size.

[Big Booger]

ahh, it had to be the one drive the one drive that I formatted with fat32
hehehe

[perris]

here's some info for everybody to consider

first, even with ntfs, 4096 is the max

second, with a good amount of ram, you are never accessing the pagefile, so the performance of the pagefile matters not a bit

third, if you put your swap on a small drive, then the heads have to pass more calendars which will counter the effectiveness of faster seek times...probably a wash.

4th, if you are on a single physical drive, the heads are for the majority of the time on the "c" partition, and that's where the swap belongs i n my opinion and experience, though I've read ms documentation that suggests there might be a performance gain by putting the swap on a separate partition, in my opinion, the only performance gain comes from the contiguous nature of the partition, since xp cannot defrag the pf

however, now with pagefile defragers available, taking the pf off the os partition will slow you down, IF you are short on ram and are accessing the pagefile often