I'm taking a computer class in college and we were just learning about memory and all that good stuff. Well there is a question in our lab book that asks why Windows puts the page file on the system partition when it is better to be seperate where it can't be fragmented, the answer is not in our book. Anyone know off the top of their head why?
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Why does Windows put the page file on the system partition?
- Thread starter XDude
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Well, this has been debated and beaten to death lately on the forums, so I'm not going to rehash any of it.
However, I can tell you, that moving the page file to another drive/partition has absolutely nothing to do with fragmentation. It used to be in good performance habits to move it to another drive, but in today's systems that have a ton of memory, combined with faster hard drives, I don't think the performance difference is really anything worthwhile.
However, I can tell you, that moving the page file to another drive/partition has absolutely nothing to do with fragmentation. It used to be in good performance habits to move it to another drive, but in today's systems that have a ton of memory, combined with faster hard drives, I don't think the performance difference is really anything worthwhile.
Whatsisname
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There is little benefit to having another partition for just the swap file, and unless its on another disk, but since most computers only have a single harddrive, its not worth it. If you do have two or more harddisks, it only takes all of 10 seconds to move the swap file after windows is installed. Its nothing worth getting bent out of shape over.
That is what I was thinking also, but the book asks, oh well.rcolbert said:
And yeah I know it has little effect on performance. The book just asks me so I wasn't sure if there was some reason I was supposed to be aware of... Maybe the book is really asking, thats why it doesn't answer it anywhere
. I'll just leave it, since it is a bonus question. Thanks.Try booting an OS where the swap file has been moved to another drive that is now unavailable. Some idiot moved his to zip drive (thought it was a hard drive or something since it was using a drive letter) and needless to say he was noboot till we figured it out. If he had more RAM it might have booted, I don't know.
Some idiot moved his to zip drive (thought it was a hard drive or something since it was using a drive letter) and needless to say he was noboot till we figured it out. If he had more RAM it might have booted, I don't know.Heh, that's funny you mention Zip drives... You know how the software really likes to make the zip drive "d:"? (it used to, newer drivers/software may play nicer)OldPueblo said:Try booting an OS where the swap file has been moved to another drive that is now unavailable.
Well, when I was supporting NT the image had the system drive partitioned with user data and the PF on the d:\ drive. Well, when you installed a zip drive it took over the d:\ drive and created the PF there. This may have been what happened to you as well...
NT boots very slow with a PF on a parallel Zip drive.