Games and partitions

[marcus]

I currently have 1 x 40GB partitioned with my OS at 30GB, and another partition of 5 GB for my 2GB pagefile. The reason my C drive is so big is because of the games i have on it.

My question is this - am I better off moving all the games to a secondary (SATA in my case) HD, and off my windows partition? This would allow me to limit my C drive to say 12GB, and maybe increase my performance for gaming (not that its not **** hot at the moment!). If Im gatecrashing Ill start a new thread, but its kinda relavant(ish).

If there is no anticipated loss, then I may well do this.

[Ginger Tosser]

I dont know if it helps, but i always have a smaller C: drive and dump apps/games on the D: drive. The way i look at it if the data doesn't change much (and game/apps setups generally dont) then lump them all together away from profiles that do.

[Moodmon]

I always try to keep all my stuff seperate. So C is Windows, D is Apps, E is Games etc. I just like knowing where stuff is. No idea whether it affects the performance mind.

[yashiro]

Never put your pagefile on a seperate partition of the same drive!. It will take twice as long to perform read/write operations.

Fastest performance would be to have the pagefile on a separate HD to your system files. The games can go on either because primarily they will be 'reading' only.

[marcus]

When I was rereading my post that occurred to me, not sure why I did it but thanks for reminding me

Ill go about repartitioning my drives today. On the pagefile, with 1GB of DDR memory I set it to a min and max of 2GB. There is always conflicting information on this, and the guide I normally use is memory plus 50, yet some people I know suggest that getting windows to allocate the PF size is the best option.

[yashiro]

You can't generalise on PF size as people use PC's for different tasks.

Leave your PF size as is, I doubt you will see any problems. If you're on an optimizing trip it's always best to have a non fragmented pagefile too. Page defrag from sysinternals will tell you if it's fragmented or not.

[sutom]

what is a pagefile exactly?

[Ginger Tosser]

Pagefile is a file used by windows when it runs out of memory. Windows pages memory chunks out to this file to preserve system memory. Its not unique to windows, linux has also has a swap file (i'm guessing Macs as well).

[sutom]

ok, so do I need to bother about finding this and doing anything to it?

I will have an XP machine soon and not sure how many partitions/drives I need...

[marcus]

Ideally, as Yashiro said, you should put the pagefile on a seperate drive to your OS.

Mine is set up as follows as of now -

Drive 1 80gb SATA (C: is 5GB for OS, D is 75GB for games and programs
Drive 2 250gb SATA (E is 4gb, for the pagefile which Ive set to 2GB min and max, I have 1GB of physical RAM, F is the remainder)

Not sure why I typed all that out, but there you go anyways.

[Ginger Tosser]

The thing is if you've got enough memory you shouldn't really have to worry too much about the page file. If you run performance monitor (under admin tools) you can check pagefile usage. Occasion peaks are expected, mine just sits at around 3% usage.