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Giving the system a boost by splitting the swap file
When physical RAM is completely consumed, Windows data is temporarily shifted to the hard drive. This can greatly slow down the computer, because the hard disk has to work continuously. If it looks like the RAM is going to get full, it’s advisable to split the swap file onto different, newly defragmented hard drives. Windows can write to several hard drives simultaneously and thus accelerate the data transfer process. However, this makes sense only if you use multiple physical disks and not just partitions, since this will force the disk to write to multiple areas, thereby slowing down access.First determine which of your drives are seperate physically and which are just partitions. For this purpose, go to
- ‘Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Computer management’.
- In the tree view structure on the left side of the window, navigate to Storage | Disk Management You will now see the physically divided data drives on the bottom right with their correspondingpartitions and the allocated logical drives.
- In addition to the system drive ‘C:’, search for the primary partitions of the other physical drives, note their drive letters and then close the Disk Management window. For configuring the swap file, double click on the ‘System’ icon in the Control Panel and switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab—or click on the ‘Advanced System Settings’ link in Vista.
- Click on ‘Settings’ under ‘Performance’. Activate the ‘Advanced’ tab and then under ‘Virtual Memory’, click Change’.
- Disable the ‘System managed size’ option, select the desired drive in the dialog box above, and then select Custom size’ and enter the desired value in the two subsequent fields, for example ‘1024’ megabyte each. Equal values for the minimum and maximum limit define a fixed size, making it impossible for the swap file to fragment the partition. Click ‘Set’.Repeat this procedure for other drives.Confirm the setting with ‘OK’.
- Restart the system for Windows to apply the settings.
Caution: You cannot create swap files on
external hard disks and memory cards.
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