RAM for swap file

[Nifrabar]

Hi!
I've been told that in XP I can set the swap-file size to 0 once I use approx. 2Gb RAM. Thisway the system should speed up very much. Is that true? Is 2Gb an lower limit?
-Bart

 

[fizzak]

You can do this but you will not see a huge speed improvement. Swap file is there incase you overflow RAM which you probably will not do with 2gb of RAM unless you are editing serious video or images.

Boot up time will be a little faster since win does not have to initalize a swap file.

 

[Nifrabar]

Thanks fizzak,
But would not give this a boost while read/write to disk using swap file is much slower than doing so in RAM?
-Bart

 

[Jasen]

Yes, reading and writing to disk is much slower than to RAM. But with 2GB of physical RAM, you probably almost never write to the swap file anyway, so you will probably not see any difference even if you disable it - it's already not being used.
I wouldn't say 2GB is the lower limit, that depends on what you do with the machine. You could probably get rid of the swap file with 1GB or less of RAM and not notice a difference, if all you do is basic web browsing/email.
But disk space is so cheap these days it really doesn't hurt anything to leave the swap there, just in case Windows does need it once in a while.

 

[linney]

RAM, Virtual Memory, PageFile and all that stuff.

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/WindowsGeneralWeb/RAMVirtualMemoryPageFileEtc.htm

http://www.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555223&SD=tech