Swap file blues

[Crankydog]

Problem: right clicking for properties on large video files takes a very long time, over 30 seconds to two minutes for CD sized ones. It seems to be reading the whole info of the file before telling me what it is. Other files seem okay but it's hard to tell since I don't have any large sized files outside of video ones (avi and mpeg).

OS: Win98SE, 128Mb ram, a 3Gb and a 60Gb hard drive, P2-266

The only fix I know of is disaling the swap file. But this causes it's own problems for the playback of some other video files.

When the OS is on a clean install after a hard drive formatting, everything works perfectly for weeks, then all of a sudden, the hard drives start doing some random intermittent searching in the first 30 seconds after boot. Yet the drives are scandisked and defragmented.

I don't have an anti-virus running in the background or any other weird programs that could fiddle with my standard settings outside of my regular ones that always worked fine (meaning that even when they aren't running or are uninstalled it's still buggy).

I've tried setting the swap file at fixed size and at standard variable size and disabling it altogether and it still doesn't seem to work right.

Am I missing something? Is the swap file the cause of my problem or a consequence of something else?😕

 

[SemperFi]

Have you tried disabling the swap temporarily to test and see if it helps. I may be totaly off base here but I seriously doubt the swap file is the problem. Unless say it is hardware related like the hard drive starting to have some problems. Do you have a 5400 rpm drive? Try downloading software from the manufacturers website and test it. Maybe do a defrag. Has this just started happening or has it been this way for years?

I make a permanent swapfile of a set drive by setting the min and max to the same size instead of letting windows manage size. Then you could use norton speed disk to move the swapfile to the outside of the disk where it is fastest. I think norton will do it. There are a couple of differnt utilities that will do it but I forget the names of the others. 😕

You may just be in need of an upgrade. 😉

 

[corkyg]

Basically, you are under-powered for video editing. You need to get up in the GHz CPU range and about 512 MB of RAM.

 

[geoff2k]

Which disk is your OS on, and which disk is your swapfile on?

 

[Crankydog]

Which disk is your OS on, and which disk is your swapfile on?

Both! Ive tried putting it on my old small and slow 3Gb and on the fast 60Gb. Both at the beginning and at the end of a drive.

I've tried locking the size at 100Mb and I've left it alone and I've disabled it completely wich fixed the access to file properties by right-clicking on the video file but it wouldn't play right afterwards.

Like I said before, it used to work fine for months with a locked 100Mb sized swap file then all of a sudden I have to wait for many seconds to access the properties for video files larger than 100Mb. A 600-700 file takes about three minutes to access and the hard drive seems to be reading the whole file before telling me what's in it.

I'm starting to think that it isn't the swap file that's the problem but something else that happens to affect the swap file. A clean install after a reformating of the hard drive solves the problem, but it's a loooooong process that takes hours to put back like it was before and I still don't know what caused the original problem.

Now I'm starting to think if it's not the memory that's getting old. The original PC-66 ram is at least 4.5 years old.