Speeding up Windows VISTA

Here's a tip that actually works!
Add a second Hard Drive to your system (I used an old 30Gb IBM Deskstar from a PowerMac G4: 7,200 rpm, UDMA 100, 2MB hard cache). Make sure the drive is correctly partitioned and formatted for NTFS, AND empty (Control Panel/ System and Maintenance/ Administrative Tools/ Computer Management/ Disk management). Switch your Swap File to this new Drive (Control Panel/ System and Maintenance/ System/ Advanced System Settings/ Performance/ Advanced/ Virtual memory) let the system manage the new Swap file.

This works beacase no matter how fast your hard Drive is in theory, it's Hard Cache is still it's fastest part. Vista constantly swaps to it's swap file to juggle all the services it runs by default; this makes the Hard cache much less effective for your Apps., games etc. All this activity is now on a separate drive (a separate partition will not work because of the Hard Cache issue) this speeds up Vista's operations and on top of this, the Bus connecting your Hard Drive to your Computer, is easily capable of transferring much data faster than your Hard Drive - so you really do get extra throughput this way, as well as the benefit of the Extra Cache, and more efficient Cache utilization. If you look up Technical data on Hard Drive performance you can see why this works.

 

Hello CSB and welcome to Major Geeks.

That tip is a good start to what I hope will be a long and distinguished posting career.
Thank you.


Studio T

 

Good tip, CSB.:cool Welcome to MG, also.:major

This tip works well with Xp as well, for those with XP. Bazza