Legit Reviews

Just recently I came across this little Win-XP tip. http://gottatopic.com/?p=149

It made a good deal of sense to me, since over a year ago I had lost a HDD due to virtual memory paging too often.
The best part about this tip is to remove the "Paging File" off of the C-drive onto another system drive as long as it's not a split partition drive, but a real separate drive.

Save Valuable Boot Time On Windows XP

Starting the computer and having to wait for that Windows loading screen can get irritating. However, there is a trick that you can use to speed it up dramatically. This trick is done by moving the Virtual Memory from the system hard drive to any other hard drive. Unfortunately, this only works if you have two or more physical hard drives (not virtual/partition):

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Right click on My Computer and then Properties. Choose the Advanced tab.
2. Click the first Settings Button under Performance. Click on the Advanced Tab on the new window that pops up.
3. Click Change under Virtual Memory
4. Select the hard drive that is not the system drive, to move the virtual memory onto it.
5. Click Custom Size. Set both values to be around twice the RAM that is currently in your computer. For example, if you have 1GB of RAM, set the size to 2048 (1GB = 1024 MB). Click Set.
6. Select the hard drive which had the virtual memory on it (the system hard drive) and click No Paging File. Then, click Set.
7. Click OK to the rest of the windows. Restart your computer. Done.

Note: This might not work after the first reboot. Give it some time. There are cases where this decreased the boot time from around 10 seconds to 3-5 seconds.


ALSO ...
To adjust for Best Performance.

1. Right click on My Computer and then Properties. Choose the Advanced tab.
2. Click the first Settings Button under Performance. Click on the Visual Effects on the new window that pops up.
3. Select the Adjust For Best Performance.
4. Click OK to the rest of the windows. Restart your computer. Done.

If you don't like the adjustment that makes windows look like 98SE, you can Custom tune the settings there to your liking. But, anything you give back to free up resources helps the overall system.

SO ...
After these tips, my frame rate on the current F@H job went from 15m:38s to 11m:48s. My son did this on his laptop and noticed an improvement right away with his F@H job as well. He once asked me why have two hard drives in a computer vs. just one big one. Now he knows the answer. His desktop only has one drive, but a small 4Gb drive may help his F@H if it becomes the Page File and Virtual Memory drive.

Thanks for the post! I wasn't quite sure about The page file being on another hard drive but this post seals the deal!

Although is it always recommended to double your Page file memory size from the amount of ram on your system?

top wrote:Although is it always recommended to double your Page file memory size from the amount of ram on your system?

That's a really good question. BUT, remember when XP first came out, many systems only had 128Mb of RAM. So doubling the Page File to 256Mb really helped. My machine has 1Gb of RAM, I picked a second drive that only had a 2.5Gb drive partition to be the Page File.

Unless your machine is very low on RAM, 1Gb of Ram with possibly the same or half the Page File should work. It really comes down to how you utilize your computer.

I changed my page file to double my 2GB ram, we'll see if it makes any difference for me.

Cool! Can't wait to see the results!

Seen as though I have raid and a second disk, i thought I'd give this a try.

Not rebooted yet, but i might post back if i notice any difference.

Dan

Remember when drive C: is highlighted, make sure to click, No Paging File. This will elevate any paging to that drive and boost the speed.


PS ... I just found out something my son showed me.

If you opt for PERFORMANCE under the VISUAL EFFECTS, make sure the, USE COMMON TASKS IN FOLDERS is checked! This really helps in My Network Places and other locations under Control Panel. So, DO NOT TURN THIS OPTION OFF, leave it CHECKED.

I have only one hard drive, but I want to try this with changing the Paging File from C drive to E drive. My 250GB hard drive is Partioned into C, D, and E drive. So would I see any performance improvement by changing it to E drive instead of keeping it at C drive?

geokilla wrote:I have only one hard drive, but I want to try this with changing the Paging File from C drive to E drive. My 250GB hard drive is Partioned into C, D, and E drive. So would I see any performance improvement by changing it to E drive instead of keeping it at C drive?

No, to get the performance, you must have it on another HDD.

But there should be a very MINOR boost right? Since I'm giving some of the load on C drive to E drive since C drive gets accessed 24/7, while E drive is like useless since that's where I store my backup files.

BTW, nice overclock on your E6850 Ken.

geokilla wrote:But there should be a very MINOR boost right? Since I'm giving some of the load on C drive to E drive since C drive gets accessed 24/7, while E drive is like useless since that's where I store my backup files.

BTW, nice overclock on your E6850 Ken.

There would be no boost as the page file is still on the same HDD.
The reason this increases performance is due to the fact the OS HDD can read data while the second HDD can write to the page file (on the other HDD) at the same time.

Thanks for the complement! I've actually lowered it slightly from 3.85 to 3.75GHz now due to temps.

kenc51 wrote:The reason this increases performance is due to the fact the OS HDD can read data while the second HDD can write to the page file (on the other HDD) at the same time.

Does partitioning put stress on the hard drive, then?

thanks for the tip. I did change as advised. will see if there is noticeable improvement but it does make sense theoretically

I think it has helped mine somewhat, I did it a few weeks ago. Now to get around to installing the affinity setter...