a quick question about virtual memory and swapfiles

i now have a partitioned HD, C:\ has prgrams, my docs and windows and is 30gb

d is 200gb and is just for storing data (valuable) and used as a download loaction for the internet etc.

i read somewhere that to speed up windows the "swapfile" could be kep th same size but moved from c to d ? is this possible (runnin win xp pro). also what about virtual memory - is this the same thing as swapfile? i have 1.5 gb ram so maybe i need not worry - but am interested anyhow, cheers guys

:-)

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HOOD

The expressions "virtual memory", "swapfile" and "paging file" all refer to the same thing. regardless of how much RAM your system has, Windows will always use virtual memory, and if you were to disable VM in the belief that you had so much RAM that VM wasn't necessary, your system would be much less responsive. Contrary to many people's belief, the more physical RAM you have, the bigger the swapfile should be. This is because more RAM means more data to shift around at any one time, so Windows needs a bigger swapfile to accomodate it. You might want to read this on how to set the virtual memory http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=25448&rl=1

But bear in mind there are several schools of thought on how best to set it up, though I have left mine at the default settings and it hasn't once told me there isn't enough. Where you need to be careful though is when you add more RAM - say from 256 to 512MB. Windows can detect the new RAM but it can't automatically increase the virtual memory to reflect the increase in RAM, so you may want to increase it manually in such a situation. If, however, Windows never warns you about VM being too low, I would leave as is.