You can increase the performance of your computer by manually allocating the size of your swap file or pagefile. You can also move your pagefile to another partition if you have one available.

You can do some nice spring cleaning on your system without reinstalling Windows but don't expect the same results. Reinstalling Windows is still the best way to get a nice crisp, clean system, there is no better way. However, you can still still get a lot done without re-formatting, and I will go into that here. There isn't really any particular order you need to do things, but basically we want to unclog the registry, update the drivers, uninstall those old un-used programs, and tweak up Windows a bit.

If you've never put any effort into tweaking up your Operating System, well, I'm sure you could use this advice. A lot of people just run out and buy a system, expect to plug it in and it all works great. Well, computers are getting more and more like that every day. But, over time, you begin to wonder why the things seem to get slower and slower. Well, that's because all you did was plug it in and turn it on. You never do any maintenance and you didn't do any tweaking from the start.

The Windows Swap File

A swap file (or swap space or, in Windows NT/Xp, a pagefile) is a space on a hard disk used as the virtual memory extension of a computer's real memory (RAM). Having a swap file allows your computer's operating system to pretend that you have more RAM than you actually do. The least recently used files in RAM can be "swapped out" to your hard disk until they are needed later so that new files can be "swapped in" to RAM. In larger operating systems (such as IBM's OS/390), the units that are moved are called pages and the swapping is called paging.

One advantage of a swap file is that it can be organized as a single contiguous space so that fewer I/O operations are required to read or write a complete file.

In general, Windows and Unix-based operating systems provide a default swap file of a certain size that the user or a system administrator can usually change. The typical size of a swap file is around 1 and half times the amount of physical memory you have, so if you had 512Mb windows would allocate something like 768Mb to your pagefile. If you change you pagefile make it around twice the amount of memory you have.

The less memory you have the more you will hear disk activity even when you are doing nothing. What's happening is Windows is re-sizing the pagefile all the while, which takes time and processing power. Obviously if you had more memory the computer would do less 'swapping' and therefore run faster, are you starting to get the picture?

Move the Swap File location

First, without re-partitioning your hard drive, you may not have a separate partition to delegate to your swap file. That's fine. If you have ANY other partition on your hard drive, you may be better to move that swap file over to the other partition rather than having it on the same partition as Windows. The reason is that Windows is really terrible at managing its own pagefile. It is always resizing it which is why your drive is always clicking away even when you're not doing anything. This constant resizing increases the fragment your hard drive prematurely. So, by keeping it on a separate partition to that of the main OS, you will not suffer longer read/write times on the main partition. Second, you may want to specify a size for the swap file to eliminate this constant resizing being done as windows manages your pagefile.

Changing your Swap file size

You can do this by going into Control Panel / System, then hitting the Performance tab and tapping the Virtual Memory button. There you tell Windows to "Let me Specify Settings for Virtual Memory" and then tell it what drive and/or size to put it. Do not give the swap file too little breathing room. I usually multiply my main memory by two and give the swap file that much space.