Best Defrag. Software

Paul43, just forget about setting a swap size. Let windows handle it. With 512 meg of RAM, it's probably not going to get used anyhow, and if it does, it will be very rarely.
Monitor it if you like, just to see what happens.
On my single drive XP box, the swap is used almost from startup, about 80 meg, but it never goes up or down from there.
I always wondered about it, and finally figured it out.
As XP loads, all services needed, are started, and then dumped to the swap. If a service is needed again during a session, it's read from swap, but nothing else ever gets written to it.
Still no noticable slowdown of any sort.
I disabled about 4 services not needed, and swap dropped to about 68 meg, and never goes beyond that.
It seems that XP simply uses it on startup, and then forgets it.

 

Question from me

Hi

Letting Windows handle things -I thought that would make the PF really big in the first place ?

If I am correct in thinking by what you have said - Windows will only make the PF the size it needs and that is a lot smaller than I have set mine at ?????

I have 512MB RAM but set my PF constant ( @ 512MB ) - if I changed & let XP handle it it would not even need this much ..... I know what you say is logical just me wanting to confirm as it really would make more sense to do as you say

I will be a PF expert someday !

 

It doesn't matter one little bit how big it is. In XP, Windows want's to set a swap of 768 meg. It only ever uses about 80 meg, but there's always the odd time it needs more, and sometimes quite a bit more. If I set it manually to 100 meg, I get mem errors working in PSP. If I set it manually to 768 meg, everything works just fine.
It's not really taking up any room, and being dynamic, it will resize itself as needed.
The only time you need worry about it's (apparently huge) size (in XP) is if you start running out of hard drive space.
It's not the actual size of the swap that has any bearing on performance, it's how much it's being used.
If you've moved it to it's own partition on the first portion of the fastest drive in your system, that's about all you can do for performance with it. Who cares if it gets fragmented? It gets rewritten, and overwritten every time you start the computer, so defragging the swap won't do you one big of good.
Setting it smaller may help a bit, but if you go too small, you get out of mem errors when working with large files.
My basic plan of attack, is to monitor it's USAGE over a span of a week or more, and then add 10% to it's MAX usage, and set the min/max at that number. Never had a problem with it since.

 

Christer,
Yes the "missing" RAM will have gone to the Video card. The way I understand the Intel Video card used in current desktop Compaq machines (possibly the same applies to a laptop if it uses a similar card) is that 64MB is reserved for the Vid card. The card will dynamically allocate the RAM (up to 64MB) as needed. If the OS requires more than the remaining 448MB (in your friends case) it will borrow some of the allocated video RAM leaving I think a minimum of 8MB for operation of the card. Very few applications will need more than the remaining 448MB though. As soon as this reserved video RAM is not needed it is returned for use on the video card. For 2D desktop applications, only a very small amount of the 64MB (probably less than 8MB) will be used, and only a relatively few graphic intensive new 3D games will ever need most of the 64MB.

Paul

 

Hey People: I've been reading this post with great interest, and learned a lot.

Now, about missing RAM? I recently upgraded my daughter's Gateway, running ME, has an NVida card installed. Had 64megs installed, pulled it & put in two sticks of 128MB, but the system info shows 184 megs installed. Drives me crazy what happened to that missing memory. Did the video card grab it?? Machine runs great, she uses very graphic intensive games, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sims Deluxe, etc. They run smooth as silk. So I guess I shouldn't complain, but every time I see that 184#, I knash my teeth!!

 

Video Card

Hi

If the video card is shared with the PC then 'Yes' it does take part of the memory. I am not sure how much - the reason I know is when I was buying my Laptop the one thing a magazine indicated was to look for one with a separate Video card - which I did.

I don't run any games etc but just took the advice. If your daughter's PC is running then

I agree the forum is one of the best - I have learned soooooo much. I ask lots but I do learn. Reading through the posts it is comforting to see that I am not the only one who has problems & has to ask questions !

 

I use O&O Defrag which I think is the best, although I haven't tried all.

A copy can be found at:- http://www.oo-software.com/