How much memory before swapfile can be disabled?

[ShowdOWN]

I am curious to know if anyone here turns off their swapfile? and if there should be a minimum physical memory running WinXP before it can be turned off?

and lastly is there a noticeable performance increase if your system if running straight off the memory?

 

[Budman]

You can never disable the swapfile,Windows needs it to run properly.

 

[SexyK]

Everything I've read has said never disable the swap file, no matter how much RAM you have. Windows likes to have it there either way, and it won't use it unless it has to. You'll just be giving yourself a headache if you decide to turn it off... it's asking for instability in the OS.

Kramer

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: ShowdOWN
I am curious to know if anyone here turns off their swapfile? and if there should be a minimum physical memory running WinXP before it can be turned off?

I would not do that and the amt would probably be large

and lastly is there a noticeable performance increase if your system if running straight off the memory?

if you could have a significant amt of ram you could..not sure what that amt would be tho

 

[ShowdOWN]

hmmm, my friend said he turned his off with having 512MB of physical memory and he has noticed an increase in performance.
i have asked him if he loads up any large files or games and he said that he can play all his games including UT2k3 and tribes 2.
i have not see his system first hand so i am just going on his word. i also wanted some advice before i kill my system.

thanks.

 

[joeld]

I remember a huge argument (4 pages +) a while back on this. Many computer and software engineers joined the conversation and people who knew the ins and outs of operating system theory in general. Basically, the conclusion was the same - don't disable it. It's there for a reason

 

[AluminumStudios]

If you're really bent on minimizing it's usage you might want to set it to a fixed, small size, but don't disable it.

I seem to remember having a heck of a time on a few systems that I worked on when I had to go into safe mode on Win2K and there was no swap file ... it would given an error about not having a swap file then log me right out ... I couldn't get in to work on Windows or set a new swap file. It was a hellish mess. In this case though the swap file was missing because hard drive partitions changed ...

 

[BFG10K]

Never ever disable the swap file. Any modern memory system such as Windows needs it to function properly.