Re: Moving the notebook recovery files to other drive partition

G.G. Willikers wrote:
John Doue wrote:
~misfit~ wrote:
Somewhere on teh intarwebs John Doue wrote:
~misfit~ wrote:
Somewhere on teh intarwebs John Doue wrote:
Roy wrote:
On Feb 14, 10:48 pm, "BillW50" <Bill...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

That is after I had removed seldom used applications, cleaned up
my temporary files....
I am not sure if hibernation support will have any effect on the
file space.Would like to hear more information about it,
BTW,I have 2 gigs of Ram installed .
My main issue if its possible to relocate the factory installed
recovery files for this PC to the D drive or even the external
hard drive?
Hi Roy! 20GB should be plenty of space for the OS and
applications. And turning off hibernation and removing the
hypernation file from the root directory of drive C will give you
back whatever amount of RAM you have. In your case, it is 2GB you
will gain if you turn it off. Also with 2GB of RAM, I know
Windows XP doesn't need a pagefile for most people. So I believe
you should try turning it off and see what happens. This will
gain whatever the size of the pagefile is. Probably a GB or more.
Hmm its good to know.
Never have done that , May I ask what is the general way of turning
down the page file?
No sweat. Control panel, system, Advanced, performance settings,
Advanced, Virtual memory, and select "No paging file" for every
drive that shows up there. A reboot will most certainly be required.
Disregard any warnings. Check after reboot to make sure your changes
have been implemented.
Spot on as usual John.

I've had the pagefile turned off on my R51 ever since I installed
2GB of RAM and haven't hit a problem once. I multi-task with it a
lot and have a small app that displays free RAM in systray. Even
when I've got more windows open than will fit on the taskbar
(including known resource-hogs like Vuze) I've never seen free RAM
go below 500MB.
Thanks for the kind words.

Have you seen any performance improvement?

Yes.

I tend to think, this is as
efficient as using the prefetch device ... not noticeable. And for
good reason: the pagefile is supposed to be used only (at least, I
believe) when memory is running low.

That's the *theory*

If it is abundant, the pagefile
is not used.

Alas, Windows doesn't work like that. It always swaps data of a certain age out of RAM into pagefile, regardless of how much RAM there is installed. In fact Widows *increases* the size of the pagefile the more RAM you add. (Always about 1.5x physical RAM.)

In a perfect word the pagefile would only be used when physical RAM got really low. Sadly Windows isn't coded like that, it makes too much sense. :-(

So the only benifit is saving on hard disk space, and
there again, who notices a saving of 2 Mg?

I notice that, with pagefile disabled, there's a lot less HDD activity and that's got to be good right? For both battery life and HDD life.

So, everything considered, I always have a pagefile, BUT of fixed
length to have HD thrashing, and located on a separate partition,
which only harbors said pagefile and my TEMP files, inasmuch windows
respects its own environment variables, which is not always the case,
as is not either the case of some badly written programs.

When I run a machine with insufficient RAM to run without a pagefile I always turn off pagefile first, defrag, then set the pagefile to a set size (min and max the same) on the fastest partition. (Usually C: as it's at the outer edge of the disk.) That way, as you say, the pagefile stays a contiguous block and isn't scattered all over the disk as Windows dynamically re-sizes it.

I used to make a seperate partition for the pagefile and format it FAT32 (as it has less overhead than NTFS and is slightly faster). However, if you're ever troubleshooting a problem and getting BSOD's Windows will only write a crash dump file if there's a pagefile on the same partition as the OS. <shrug> Seems easiest to put it there as it's usually fastest and that data dump file can be handy.

Cheers,
Well, I may experiment some day since all my machines have 2g of ram, except for an ancient Twinhead that cannot handle more than 500Mb. As for the dump file, I consider it well named, since I would not be able to make any useful use of it.

Even if this makes me old fashioned, I refuse to use NTFS since I have seen only drawback to this system: slower performance, much more difficult recovery after a crash (usual the drawback of supposedly more stable system; I found the same to be true with Linux, which, as any OS DOES crash), and most importantly, way fewer utilities to deal with a problem.

This is one of the many reasons which will prevent me from ever moving away from XP, at least until someone, preferably not MS, comes up with an OS which combines ease of use and compatibility. Needless to say, I will be using XP for quite some time, God willing.

Pleasant surprises with Windoze 7 beta thus far. Give it a kick.
Of course I will have to learn it inside and out because the corporate enterprise can only deploy XP a little while longer.

I would be interested in trying it, but as I said, it involves moving from Fat32 to NTFS, and that is a no no for me. Of course, I could test this on a specific machine after a full image backup, but until any upgrade of XP brings me a definite advantage over XP, I am not going to waste any time in such test. Although I love computing, I still need to find some time for other activities ... and life is getting shorter every day!

Thanks for sharing your impressions!

--
John Doue
.

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