FortKnox's Journal: Setting the Windows Swap Manually?

OK, I think I *may* know why my computer games keep freezing. I had messed with partitions (without wiping them), enlarged them and such, and I think it may be when windows tries to swap (not EVERY swap, but like 1 in 10).
My question: How do you setup the windows swap manually?

Now wait, I know WHERE to do it, I'm just not keen on swaps. Is it twice your memory or what? I have 256MB memory and my windows parition is 5GB. What's the formula for swap space?

Re:how about . . .

[FortKnox]

Where do I start? What swap size?

BTW - it isn't crashing, its just freezing in heavy-duty video games (heavy duty meaning high end resource hogs).

Re:how about . . .

[gmhowell]

Since my latest Win'98 reinstall, I've let it handle swap on its own. Prior to that, I set it at twice RAM and ignored it.

by the time he's done the machine will be obsolete

[TechnoLust]

With a reboot and a game load/start between every increment... I doubt he has that kind of time! In the old days (when machines came with 8 MB of RAM) I usually did 4x the RAM. However, I've heard many people say never go over 512MB...

BTW freezing usually means power loss (bad mobo, power supply too weak for system) or bad RAM chip (usually in the last bank so it only happens with memory hog apps.) If the swap size doesn't help, try taking the RAM chips out 1 at time (for DIMMs, obviously in pairs if paired SIMMs) and swapping for other if you have it, or just try it with less RAM. If that doesn't work, see if you can reproduce it by starting all the disks (hard, floppy, optical) at once, but not running some memory hog app. (i.e. open all CD(DVD)-ROM drives and load a CD, put a floppy in A:, and doubleclick drive A, load the CDROMs and start a virus scan all at once.) These things should tell you where the problem is.

Microsoft doesn't give much of a fudge factor.

[Keith Russell]

The default minimum is RAM + 12 MB. Kind of a low ceiling. The general rule of thumb I've heard is to double that. Windows will expand the swapfile on the fly, up to the max you set, but it's horribly expensive. So, for 256 MB RAM, I'd start with, oh, 640 MB swap. That ought to be enough for anybody. If that 5GB'er is all you have on that PC, I wouldn't take the max swap too far above that. Another reason to start large.

If you have another partition or drive on that PC, you can put another swap file there, and save space on the boot partition. Windows always prefers the swap file on %SYSTEMROOT%, so you can get away with 256MB swap there, and find another partition with gobs of space for the rest.

BTW, I'm assuming you're using NT, 2K or XP. If you're using some 9x derivative, take it out behind the shed and shoot it. :-)

Re:Microsoft doesn't give much of a fudge factor.

[jeffy124]

Windows will expand the swapfile on the fly, up to the max you set, but it's horribly expensive

that's correct, but one way to improve upon it is to set both the minimum and maximum swap sizes to be identical.

What version of windoze?

[Sunda666]

in NT-like windozes you can adjust it in the VM control panel. In 9x, i'm not sure how to do it.

The magic formula tends to be swap size = 2*ram size. Works pretty smoothly in my 'doze NT servers.

cheers.