How big is your swap file ?

bonsai

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always a bit apprehensive about how/what windows
does and doesnt do on my p.c.

If you are online most of the day, how big does your swap file
become ?

I'm using W95 and at the moment it is 47.5mb.
The file is win386.swp

is it much the same in later versions ?

would appreciate it if you would post the size of your file.

thanks.
 
165Mb.

Bonsai, how the heck do you manage to trade using Win95? Its almost as unstable as Win98 isnt it?
 
hello big boy !
165mb. ?

now I am confused.
is W95 more efficient but with less extras ?
more frequent file writes and saving perhaps?

don't know about W98 but only occasional problems here.
 
I'm on Win ME as well.

It's like everything else with Windows the files just get bigger and bigger and bigger with each new release.
 
It's not called that under XP. Under NT or 2K look under Settings/System/Advanced/Performance Options/Virtual Memory. I expect it's somewhere similar under XP. Mine is 766MB, which is the default value, 1.5 times the system memory. In practice I never use it, or much of it, but with disks the size they are these days there's little point is skimping on it.
 
GS,

Just found it and it is 382Mb which it says is the recommended size but I have the option to go up to 768Mb


Paul
 
If it's Virtual Memory, GS is right, it should be 1.5 times RAM. I've been looking at this thing elsewhere. I'm told other fiddling can slow you down.

Cheers
 
Microsoft recommend 1.5 times Physical RAM.

However the more RAM you have the less of a swap file you need as it's only used as overspill for RAM.

Mines rarely used and I run 2K Pro with 512M

JonnyT
 
The paging file on win2K and XP is called pagefile.sys and
located in the root dir of a partition. I have a gig of memory
in my PC and my XP windows has automatically decided to use
1.5gig hd space.

ImranQ
 
we may be at cross purposes here.
in win95, virtual memory will use as much as it needs up to disk space available.

looks like you have been giving 'reserved' space values which
will obviously be much higher than my actual usage.

I was trying to get a handle on how much was 'actually used'
at the end of the dayrather than 'reserved' space.
 
bonsai said:
I was trying to get a handle on how much was 'actually used'
at the end of the dayrather than 'reserved' space.

In that case the answer, as JT has said, is probably not much, if you have enough RAM. I have 512MB and rarely use it all. However, I was recently using an older system with 256MB, since my PSU died on me, and once I had 2 instances of Sierra, 2 or 3 Internet Explorers, Excel and Visual Studio loaded the system became pretty well unusable, it was spending so much time swapping.

So in practice I'd rather make sure I never need to use the virtual memory at all, by having enough of the phyisical stuff!

However, even if you have loads of RAM it's probably not a good idea to make the pagefile too small, you can apparently hang the system if it tries to swap and the pagefile is limited to too small a size.
 
on a slightly different subject, I thought I would take a look at my 'internet temporary files' which is the user end of the ie cache.

full of every 'object' that appears on every page you view on this board.
 
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