windows paging file

[noob with an RS 10+ year member]

i have a seagate hard drive.. it is 60 GB and i have windows installed on a 10GB partition of the seagate drive. should i have the page file on the same partition as windows, or on the other partition.. or on a totally seperate physical hard drive? (i have three hard drives.. seagate, WD, and maxtor)

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[Raven 10+ year member]

That 5400 rpm drive is going to be a bottleneck regardless of where the page file goes, I think.

 

[noob with an RS 10+ year member]

That 5400 rpm drive is going to be a bottleneck regardless of where the page file goes, I think.

whats that suppose to mean?

 

[Raven 10+ year member]

Easy, any time you transfer data between two HDDs, the faster one must slow down to the rate of the slower one. Just like a super fast processor with slow ram will make a slow computer. Hence, bottleneck. Besides, you're running Windows, which is the biggest bottleneck of computer potential in the first place. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/wink.gif.608e3ea05f1a9f98611af0861652f8fb.gif

If Windows XP is installed on the faster drive, I'd say keep the paging file on the same drive. I personally like to keep everything on a seperate partition in case I must format and reinstall the OS, so I recommend the same HD, but the second partition.

 

[noob with an RS 10+ year member]

ahhhh ok thank you raven for the good input.. good info

 

[noob with an RS 10+ year member]

i think i really need to buy RAM now that u mention it.. ive got an athlon 64 3.0 gHz processor which truly runs at 1.8 gHz.. or is rated to. ive only got 512 MB of DDR RAM.. do u think im bottlenecking it with that amount of RAM?

 

[snebes 10+ year member]

with the speed of that ram....shouldnt you be running ddr2 with that? I got out of building systems a while ago so I don't know current stuff that well...

 

[noob with an RS 10+ year member]

what? my mother board calls for ddr ram i dont know if ddr2 works with it

 

[Raven 10+ year member]

As long as it's the same pin configuration it will work. If you get super fast ram, you will be bottlenecked by the motherboards bus speeds. If you upgrade that, you'll be bottlenecked by the processor speed. Fix that, the hard drive read time. It's an endless circle of strengthening the weakest link in a mobius strip chain.

BTW, what's the PC for? Internet, email, and solitair? Or is it going to be a serious gaming rig?

 

[theCybe 5,000+ posts]

( rpm isn't the end-all spec for transfer speeds of a hard drive; some HD's may have eight platters, some may have four. )

( i'd recommend the paging file on a seperate drive entirely, preferably one with a large cache. )

Easy, any time you transfer data between two HDDs, the faster one must slow down to the rate of the slower one. Just like a super fast processor with slow ram will make a slow computer. Hence, bottleneck. Besides, you're running Windows, which is the biggest bottleneck of computer potential in the first place

Incorrect, data isn't copied drive-to-drive, it's copied drive-to ram-to drive.

Windows, however, is definitely the worst bottleneck //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

I'd suggest seeking out a guide to adjust your 'system services' according to the computer's application;

No need for a ton of worthless network services if it's an mp3 player, or standalone gaming rig; and likewise, no need extraneous processes if it's an email machine.

I think annoyances.org has information on that.