OT: Speeding up a slow computer

[Will]

dogscoff said:

Wouldn't it make more sense to move the swap rather than C: ?I guess it depends how much memory he has and how often the swap is used. Does Windows allow you to put your swap drive onto a USB flash drive? They tend to be pretty quick if you have a spare USB2 slot, and you can get a gig or two for pocket change these days. Then you could have Windows on one hard drive, games, programs and data on another and swap on USB, for super-fast performance=-)

But do max out your memory first, as Will suggests.

IIRC, it isn't normally possible to move the pagefile (swap) from C:. I'm sure there's some hack to get it stored elsewhere, but it's likely one of those annoying things that resets itself all the time, so more trouble than it's worth. As for using a thumbdrive as swap space, like AstralWanderer said, write times are slower. Although the overwriting of data isn't really that big of a deal unless you are doing very memory intensive tasks that start and stop new address spaces a lot (most people don't). It's easier for a virtual memory manager to keep a page in swap even after it's read back into main memory, since if the page is not dirty and is picked to go back into swap, the manager doesn't need to write it again, which increases performance a bit.

And Xrati has a good point as well. Norton et. al. tends to slow things down a lot, since they actively scan files in the background. Not computationally intensive, but very I/O intensive, and that will slow things down a lot. There's better products out there.