Acer laptop page file?

[Oldmoparguy1]

My new laptop has a 120gig HD partitioned into a ~53gig C: drive, a ~53gig D: drive and a unknown 4.88gig partition. The C & D drives are formatted fat32. I just increased the size of the page file and moved it to the D: partition. This seems to have freed up the system somewhat, at least It feels as if it did. Apparently, XP has a utility to change a partition from fat32 to HPFS on the fly. Would this improve the performance of the the drive or should I leave it as is?

I'm considering buying another gig of memory and creating a ram drive for the page file. Anyone done this before? Comments?

 

[tmorris1]

It isn't going to help performance to move the pagefile in your case since it is physically on the same drive. It would help if your D: drive was on a separate hard drive instead of another partition on one drive.

It makes no sense to buy ram to use as a Ramdrive for the pagefile. If you get another GB of RAM your laptop will not be touching the pagefile since it will have plenty of physical RAM to use. The extra GB will help your performance in itself without creating a RAM drive.

Definitely get the drives converted to NTFS. Fat32 wastes a lots of space on big drives. Your files will take up less disk space in NTFS, plus it is more secure.

 

[Oldmoparguy1]

Thanks tmorris1. I appreciate it.

 

[BillionPa]

default formatted as FAT!??! what the #@$%! are those jerks thinking?

as for putting the swap on the other partition, it will actually slow down the system as the read/write heads of the drive need to move around more to get to it from the OS partition.

get more ram.

if you want speed, partition the drives properly, and configure the operating system to use them accordingly.

or, get a E-SATA PCMCIA card and an i-RAM and put the swapfile on there, it will be VERY fast.

 

[Oldmoparguy1]

Uhhh... This is an ACER laptop with a 5400RPM HD. Who knows why ACER formats the drives to FAT32. I'm looking at possibly getting a 160gig 7200RPM drive. I don't need the space, but the extra drive speed will help a bunch. Right now I'm running Opera with 6 tabs open, 2 copies of noatpad, windows explorer and freecell, with AVG running a scan in the background. As far as the swap files goes, it depends...

 

[JustinH]

Hey guys.

I'll chime in. I'm a certified tech, and do this all day long.

If you only have one hard drive in the machine, then moving it to a different partition on the same drive isn't going to make any performance increase.

Also you should let windows dynamically adjust the page file, its gotten better at this. In the old days of win98, doing a manual page file might get a bit, but now its not worth the time.

If you had two seperate hard drives, then moving it to the other drive would help out a bit, but again its not much.

My question to you would be this. Who partitioned that drive? Acer puts a recovery partition on the drive, that explains the 4 gig recovery partition, but I don't understand what they did with the other 54gb one.

Unless someone was using it as a data partition which is very possible.

If you want to make the laptop faster, put more ram in it.

Get yourself a copy of perfectdisk, and defrag the hard drive, and you can defrag the pagefile in offline mode.

That speeds things up.

 

[Oldmoparguy1]

It's a brand new laptop, I bought it in late October, 06. Paid $800 with the $100 rebate from Comp-USA. Has the 17.1" wide screen. Like it very much. I just can't help fiddling with things. I'm shopping for memory right now. It's got 1 gig now. It has a AMD Turion TL-50 duo core processor.