defrag before or after setting virtual memory?

[Taylorm]

Hello folks ive been running my harrdrives for about a month without a defrag or anything and i heard that setting a swap file to half my memory would be a good idea. so do i set the swap file THEN defrag? Or Defrag THEN set the swap file? I want best performance possible

also i read its a good idea to put ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 in system.ini under [386enh] to help prevent memory leaks.

any comments/suggestions? I want to make this baby as fast and stable as possible

Thanks

 

[LordQria]

If you completely disable virtual memory, restart (may have to be in safe mode if you have lots of items loading in the background during a normal start) and remove the win386.swp file. You can defrag w/o the swap file on the hard drive. After the defrag, crank the virtual mem back on w/ the min and max being equal and you shouldnt have any trouble keeping the swap file defragmented.

 

[Zenmervolt]

I would recommend that you defrag after the swapfile edit because you are altering a large file. Personally I defrag about once a week regardless. Defrag just re-organizes the files on your HDD in a more effiecient manner, running programs and saving/editing files "messes up" your HDD and destroys the organization. Just defrag often. There will not be a huge performance increase from defraging, however, it mainly shortens load times not the time it takes for the computer to complete a task or calculation (ie. defragging will not give you more FPS in Quake, though it will make Quake load a second or two sooner).

Aaron Meyer

 

[medic]

If you add ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 to your system.ini and have a good amount of ram and not alot of junk in your startup group, after you reboot you should have a 0 size swapfile.
CTL-ALT-DLT and shut everything down except systray and explorer, Scandisk/surface then fully defrag/reboot.

 

[Stringy]

As LordQria mentioned, I usually Defrag with the Swapfile completely disabled, this helps two fold...
one it keeps you Swapfile from being fragmented and making swapfile hits more time consuming than they already are
and Second, it makes the rest of your drive access more efficient and generally faster access....

As long as you don't have much running at startup you should be ok with 256Mb of RAM...
Besides having more crap load at startup only slows boot time anyways...



Craig