Question to computer wizzes here (if any)

[opponheimer]

:)...........................

[MELLO*SOS]

Do you have 2 hard drives in your computer? If so make a partition on your 2nd drive and move your swap/page file there.

[Vision Garage]

just partition the hard drive into two seperate drives. One just for the operating system the the other for storage. This will allow you to remove the clutter of all the programs into a seperate partition allowing the OS to "realisticly" be seperated from the other drive. Even if there is only one hard drive.

[jrmiller84]

^ You can do that but that's no different than increasing the swap file size on the current partition since the bottleneck is still the same hard drive. The only way I can think of that would make adding two partitions any faster would be that the OS wouldn't have to fragment the swap file across the partition(since that's all that would be on it), but it's quite possible that the OS will still do that anyway and there's no way to stop it.

The best way to see data access times increase is to purchase a hard drive that has faster access speeds. Find out if your drive is rated at 7200 RPM's or less. 7200 is the norm right now and has been for a little while. Getting a drive that operates at faster than 7200 RPM will shoot the price up so it's up to you have bad you want to increase the speed.

You can also consider going SATA instead of IDE (if you're currently running IDE of course). SATA's has a slightly faster bus speed and will open programs/files quicker.

Just keep in mind that this will only increase access speed times when opening files or applications, not overall computer performance like rendering within a pc game.

[StaticX27]

Just so you know, any time you repartition a drive, you're completely wiping your computer. Up until Vista, any time you made ANY changes to a drive, you had to completely remove the old partition and reformat a new partition.

What your friend is talking about is upping the virtual memory, but you have to understand, most people can't use all the virtual memory that's available to them, or even what is defined as the windows' default size. No matter how many ways you slice it, the moment you're talking about virtual memory, you're talking about using the data transfer rate of a cable over a distance, which is going to be considerably slower than the transfer rate to the computer's physical memory (AKA RAM). The idea behind making a computer run "faster" or "smoother" is to upgrade your computer to the point that you dont' need to access that virtual memory, ala add more RAM.

[240meowth]

one practice i have seen is making 3 partitions, 1 for all the OS/programs, one for all the space you will be using for media/work, and the last one is a small partition usually something like a gig or around there depending how big your hard drive is.

set the drive for the virtuatl memory/disk caching to the last drive, the smaller drive. and here's the theory:

when the computer is using disk caching it write temprary files to the disk, and if any other things are writting to the disk, it becomes fragmented easily. with a special small partition to handle all the disk caching the files are written to a specific location, which makes the disk fragmented less easily.

this is what i do, but i have nothing to compare it to, so i don't know how much of a difference there is.

p.s. i'm a+ cert :)

[MELLO*SOS]

you can repartition a drive without wiping it, check out programs like partition magic. They work differently than using command line fdisk

By making a partition exclusively for the swap, the swap file will never become fragmented. This will help out a lot if you're swapping a lot, like on a machine with 1gb of ram and you're doing video or graphics work. Ideally you'd want windows operating system on a drive of it's own, the swap partition on a drive of it's own and all your applications and storage on a separate drive. Not everyone has or wants to have 3 drives though, so partition one drive for swap and windows OS then use your other drive for storage. Put windows onto your fastest drive, you'll notice it makes a big difference....

If you can, upgrade to a SATA2 3gbs 7k or 10k rpm drive. 750gb drives are getting cheap, I just bought 4 of them for $225 each the other day.

GL