swap file

You may want to play around with the size of the swapfile. I found that on this machine, 345MB seems to be the best size. I have 1.5GB physical memory in it. On another machine with 768MB physical memory, I found that 300MB Swapfile worked best on it. Yet another machine with 256MB physical memory has a 400MB swapfile. These settings were tested in various situations and I concluded that they were the best for each of the configurations. The first machine has XP on it, the other two run 2K. Other than the size, do all of what Phant said above. The size is subjective and everyone and their brother has an opinion about the size (or lack) of the swapfile. I do agree that 1.5x physical memory is usually best, but if you have copious amounts of RAM, you might want to shrink the swapfile to a size that is large enough for your needs but not too large. If you have a 1GB Swap and never use more than 30MB of it, that is wasted space.

I have my swapfile set to 250mb minimum and 1024 maximum (512mb of memory in my system). It never peaks over 250mb for games or heavy, normal usage. When working with multiple graphics programs etc.. (I'm quite a power user), it does break the 250mb limit. But it does not matter since my partition is on its own partition.

I'm using 294MB as it is. I've seen it up to 900, however. Min is 768, Max is 2050. Own partition as well, but I sometimes put large files on there just as a temporary store.

Sounds easy enough but one question? My D: drive has all my backups and is currently formatted in Fat32. Will repartioning and creating the 1 gig NTFS partition at all effect current data?

Click to expand...

It depends on what tools you will use. There are programs like PartitionMagic that let you resize/move/create partitions without losing data. More basic tools like fdisk mean complete data loss on affected partitions.

if you are worried about data loss cogenmaster, then post your current partition setup here and we will talk about it.

Dos Boot Partition

While I am picking your brains, I have another question. Can I create a Dos boot partition with Windows XP. I don't have a floppy drive on my machine and I cannot find the bootable CD I made. I remember when I upgraded 98 to 2000 at boot up you could choose to boot into MSDOS or Windows 2000. Is this possible with Windows XP. Thank You. Eric

bootable xp

//winxp.bink.nu website

you can format with fat32, sure. if you wanna boot into DOS, you need a boot disk, windows 98/ME, or you need to do some serious mucking around with DOS files, etc, which if you have anyway then you have the floppy.

You could download boot images from www.bootdisk.com to make a bootable CD for DOS I am sure I remember someone saying.