Bill Z Bubba's Performance Guide Rev 2.0


Bill Z Bubba

 

Posted

Bill Z Bubba's System performance Guide Rev 2

Good day, all. I had promised several folks that I would get around to this rewrite, so be prepared for a LOT of information. This guide is broken up into four sections.

Section One will cover MY computing philosophy when it comes to gaming, and will lay out the groundwork for WHY you should follow the other sections within this guide.

Section Two will cover Basic system cleanup and security. This section should improve performance and take minimal effort on your part.

Section Three will cover video driver optimizations and explanations of settings both in game and within the driver.

Section Four will cover Advanced system cleanup. This section is not for little wussies that are a-scareded of learning too much.


Let's begin!


SECTION ONE (Casual computing equates to a sub-par gaming experience)

A little history to get the ball rolling seems to be in order. I am a gamer. I am also addicted to the eye candy that has been rolling off the shelves in the past few years. The advances made in the 3D graphics community have been nothing short of phenomenal over the last decade. The technological dance between the hardware vendors and the software writers has taken us from Pong to the gloriousness of City of Heroes/Villains, F.E.A.R., and Far Cry.

Even early on, I found that my knowledge was inadequate to the task of keeping up with the accelerating evolution of the gaming industry. What could I possibly do to alleviate this problem? I became a tech. Not only has this kept me mostly up to date with the goings on of PC architecture, but it allowed me to fund my addiction.

The two now play hand in hand with my most favorite of hobbies, but there has been a price. I now REFUSE to game unless I've properly optimized every facet of the device which allows me to game. In order to have the performance, the eye candy and the lack of issues I have, sacrifices were made. Knowledge was gathered. And Bill's PC tweak guide is the product. Well, the real product is my game system. The guide is only to help others enjoy their gaming more.

My system:
The motherboard: ASUS P4C800-E
The video card: Xtacy Radeon X800XT AGP 256MB upgraded from a Radeon 9800 non-pro flashed up to pro
The ram: 2GB of DDR400 PC3200 4X512MB
The sound: Creative Audigy 2 with 5.1 speaker setup
The monitor: 24" widescreen LCD running at 1920X1200 upgraded from a 24" wide CRT that finally died on me
The hard drive: 10K RPM 80GB running on SATA
The case: CasEdge Diabolic Minotaur

I game on this system. I also use it to store my mp3s, with which I play my bass guitar whilst listening to them with WinAmp. NOTHING else occurs on my game system.

No anti-virus solutions, no software firewalls, no MS Office, nada, zip, nothing. If you wish to have one system that you do everything on, that's your choice, or your financial situation, but doing so is against my philosophy. I have a separate desktop for all my other computing needs. I advise, if at all possible, that you do the same.

The philosophy: If I'm going to game, I deserve the best that I can get out of the hardware that I can afford. We all deserve this, but ONLY YOU can make it happen.

Microsoft sure as hell won't help you, the vid card manufacturers want you to drop $500 every 4 months, 3rd party software vendors don't give a damn about your performance, so it's YOUR job to make things right.

If you are not prepared to learn a few things, and work hard for your gaming experience, quit reading now, go away and cease asking for help. You don't deserve it. I said, GOOD DAY, SIR!

Still here? Good, let's get busy.


SECTION TWO (Items every gamer should know

So your gaming PC drags, locks up, or isn't performing as it once did?

Well it's YOUR fault! At least partially.

Some notes about Windows XP. It sucks! But it's also the best Operating System (OS) Microsoft has come out with since DOS 6.2, so let's do what we can to make it a streamlined, properly functioning OS.

Basic Maintenance: (The following information is based on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. If you are not running this, or Vista, by now, you should really put some thought into upgrading.)

Update your freaking OS already. Windows Update exists for a reason. That reason being that Microsoft opens holes as often as they close them. However, do NOT enable Windows Update to run automatically as this is a performance drain. Every Friday night, before the happy weekend of gaming, bring up Windows Update from your programs list and download ALL Critical Updates. View the Optional and Driver Updates but only install the Optionals if you know they are relevant to you, and only install the Driver Updates if they have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your video or sound cards.

Spyware and viruses are NOT your friends. Get rid of them. Matter of fact, stop doing stupid things to get them. Quit hitting the porn sites, quit clicking yes when a webpage asks you to install something, quit being so trusting. There are evil folks running amuck on this planet, and a great many of them have computers and company logos.

Download and install the following programs:
Ad-Aware from here.

Spybot from here.

These programs do NOT stop incoming garbage from getting on your system unless you purchase the full versions. I do NOT advise this, as allowing anything to run in the background degrades your system's performance. Run them both weekly at the minimum. A great time is Friday night right after you've installed all of MS's Critical Updates.

Keeping your system free of adware, spyware and bloatware will aid you greatly in the fight against viruses and security holes.

If you can't promise yourself to manually run a free virus check monthly, then install an anti-virus solution. AGAIN, I personally do NOT advise this, as the majority of AV solutions out there are bloated crapware that degrade performance more than they keep you safe. If you DO install one, disable it while gaming.

A little interjection here:

Norton and McAfee's Internet Security bundles are the most intrusive, system clogging, problem causing sacks of excrement on the face of the earth. Do NOT use these products. If you are TRULY worried about your internet security, you should buy a router with an internal firewall to place in between your cable/dsl modem and your systems. Windows Firewall is somewhat useless and problem causing as well, but if you refuse to get a router, enable it. If you have a router and have enabled its firewall, make sure that Windows Firewall is Off by going to Start/Control Panel/Windows Firewall.

Yes, there's too much junk running in the background of your OS and you need to get rid of it.

Back to the Start button, right click it and choose Open, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it's garbage. Delete it and close the window. Right click Start again and choose Open All Users, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it's garbage. Delete it and close the window. (These are just shortcuts to various executable files. Deleting them WILL not delete the programs that they are associated with.)

"But Bill! I use those programs!" Tough noogies. Start them manually WHEN YOU NEED THEM. Allowing them to start up with Windows does nothing but waste valuable system resources.

Reboot your system. Now run Disk Defragmenter. It can be found under Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. This may take 15 minutes. This may take 3 hours. Run it, let it finish. How often you run this is a personal choice. I run it every time I add or remove a game. Beyond that, I attempt to run it once a month.

Update your Video Card and Sound Drivers!

Step one is to download Driver Cleaner 3 from here.

"But why do I need that, Bill?" Probably because you keep installing drivers on top of drivers and haven't properly cleaned up anything ever.

Step two is to get the latest version of your video driver.

Head back into Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and Uninstall every listing you find of your video driver. (ATI now makes this simple by adding the ATI Software Uninstaller. This yanks everything and prompts a reboot.) Reboot your system. As it comes back up, it may tell you that it is reinstalling your display adapter. Cancel out of this, twice if need be.
Now run Driver Cleaner and clean every instance of your video components that you see listed. (For ATI, you should be able to only choose ATI, ATI WDM and ATI Uninstaller.)
Install the latest version of your video driver.

Check the manufacturer's website for your sound card and see if they have anything new. If they do, grab them and get them installed the same way, unless all you are downloading is a patch to your existing driver. (Driver Cleaner can also be used to strip out Creative drivers.)

At this point, you should already notice improvements in the quality and performance of your system. Enjoy.

Optional: Because my system has 2GB of RAM, I have no need of a swap file. In my testing with CoH when I only had 1GB of RAM, I saw no errors without a swap file, but the general attitude is that killing off Virtual Memory should ONLY be done if you have MORE than 1GB RAM. To disable Virtual Memory/Swap File, go to Control Panel/System/the Advanced tab/the Settings button under Performance/the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory, click Change. For all drives, select No Paging File, and click the Set button. You will have to restart when finished.

If you REALLY want to see your system happy, let's move on to tweaking your settings.


SECTION THREE (Getting that video card to SMOKE (Metaphorically, of course, as actually causing your vid card to smoke is a BAD thing, mmmkay?))

A little general information:
If you are running on a CRT, I advise setting your refresh rate to 75Hz and at a resolution no lower than 1024X768. As monitor size increases past 17", so should your resolution.
If you are running on an LCD, you should leave the resolution at the factory set Optimized resolution and 60Hz refresh, because running at anything lower will cause an overall fuzziness to your images due to the way LCDs are manufactured.

The following instructions are written based on ATI's Catalyst Driver package 6.3 with the Catalyst Control Panel. If you are running an Nvidia card or you've chosen to go with the 3rd party tweaked Omega drivers, you'll need to locate these items on your own.

For explanations of the settings:
ATI folks go here.
Nvidia folks go here.

In Catalyst Control Center:

Under Display Options:
3d Refresh Rate Override: Same as Desktop

Under 3D settings:
Anti-Aliasing: 4X (Uncheck the Let Application Decide box)
Anisotropic Filtering: 4X (Uncheck the Let Application Decide box)
Catalyst A.I.: Disabled
Mimmap Detail Level: Full to Quality
Wait for Vertical Refresh: Always On
SmartShader: None
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Disabled

API Specific:
Direct3D:
Enable geometry instancing: yes
Support DXT texture formats: yes
Alternate pixel center: no
OpenGL:
Triple Buffering: yes
Force 24-bit Z-buffer depth: no

***READ ME!***
Under SMARTGART:
Fast Writes: Off (THIS IS VITALLY IMPORTANT TO YOUR PERFORMANCE.)
If you do not see the SMARTGART section, you probably have a PCI-E card.
***READ ME!***


SECTION FOUR (You want me to do WHAT?!?!?)

In this section, I will be sharing with you some great resources to study with, research issues with, and to simply bone up your knowledge with. I will also be taking you through a few items in the system registry to nuke, as well as a few services that can be done away with without issue.

The Windows XP Registry: This is not a place to be if you don't know what you're looking for, and it most CERTAINLY isn't a place to be mucking about if you don't know what to do with the items you have found.

That said, Let's Go Delete Some Garbage!

Click on Start, then Run. In the run box, type in regedit and hit Ok. Weclome to the registry editor. Do not fear, young readers! As long as you tough NOTHING but what I'm telling you to touch, all will be well.
But just in case, read this Microsoft article.

Before following the rest of my instructions, to be the good techboy I'm supposed to be, I must advise making a backup of your system state as described in this MS article.

Ok, now with that inanity out of the way...

Let's get to the two sections you want to look at.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion

Within these two paths, there are three items we are seeking. Run, RunOnce and RunOnceEx. When you click on the Run folder, items should pop up on the right side.

The only item that MUST remain on the right side is "(Default) REG_SZ (value not set)."

Everything else on the right side is something YOU will have to determine whether should be kept or deleted. In a nutshell, if you find that it is related to your anti-virus solution, your sound card or your video card, leave it alone. If it's NOT related to those items, you can right click the NAME of the key, and choose delete.

DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE IN THE REGISTRY BESIDES THE CONTENTS OF THESE 5 KEYS!
Do NOT delete ANYTHING from the left window.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\RunOnceEx
The CONTENTS will appear in the RIGHT window when you have Run, RunOnce or RunOnceEx HIGHLIGHTED on the right.

If you delete something you weren't supposed to, follow the instructions from the MS links above on restoring your system state.

WINDOWS SERVICES: Below is all I plan to tell you about disabling unnecessary windows services. The Services MMC can be found in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services.

Here's one services guide.

Here's another.

Services that I would completely disable:
Automatic Updates
Error Reporting Service
Indexing Service
Messenger
Themes



CONCLUSION:
Game happy, or quit gaming.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Nice rewrite Bill, good job!


 

Posted

Bill Z, maybe you could tell me why my Disk Defragmenter does nothing. I open it up, select a drive, click Analyze and nothing happens. Ever. Same with Defragment. It doesn't give an error message or freeze or even appear to take up any system resources. It just sits there.

I figured it might have been a Service I disabled, but I don't have the foggiest which it might be, as my computer works fine apart from that and none I have disabled said anything about "You won't be able to defragment your hard drive after this!"


 

Posted

That's a new one to me. Everything I'm finding through search-fu is coming up that it was related to disabling services. Not knowing which ones you've hit, I'd be unable to help. If you kept a list of all the services you disabled, you could go back through one at a time and determine which one killed defrag.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Bill, is it really necessary to tell people to open Regedit (something you really shouldn't tell people to open ever) when they could just open MSConfig and just turn the services off that way?

As for Themes, I would be aware that's going to make your Desktop go back to Classic Windows view.


 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Bill, is it really necessary to tell people to open Regedit (something you really shouldn't tell people to open ever) when they could just open MSConfig and just turn the services off that way?

As for Themes, I would be aware that's going to make your Desktop go back to Classic Windows view.

[/ QUOTE ]

MSConfig, ahh if only it worked. Here's what msconfig does:
It creates new -run keys in the registry and moves the items you've disabled using msconfig into the new - directories in the registry. More often than not, the programs that put those executables in the Run folders slaps them right back into the active folder, while msconfig leaves a copy in the -run folder. So even though msconfig now shows those items to be disabled, they aren't. So, no, I will never tell anyone to use msconfig unless it is to prove to them that an item is the cause of an issue. I'll then have then reset msconfig to normal and have them manually edit the problem child from the registry. While msconfig is a great troubleshooting tool, as a configuration tool, it sucks.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

This is EXACTLY what I needed. CoX has been dredging along and I am going to be rebuilding my box this weekend (probably going to do a minor hardware refresh) and this is something that will definately help me. THANKS!!!!!!


The Porcelain God - DarkKinetics Corruptor
Meat Juice - DarkDarkSoul Brute
Pretty and Strong - Do you really have to ask?

 

Posted

I truly hope this helps you, and everyone else that reads it. Computer probs suck for everyone.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Optional: Because my system has 2GB of RAM, I have no need of a swap file. In my testing with CoH when I only had 1GB of RAM, I saw no errors without a swap file, but the general attitude is that killing off Virtual Memory should ONLY be done if you have MORE than 1GB RAM. To disable Virtual Memory/Swap File, go to Control Panel/System/the Advanced tab/the Settings button under Performance/the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory, click Change. For all drives, select No Paging File, and click the Set button. You will have to restart when finished.


[/ QUOTE ]

ok wondering on this as i have 2 gig ram,does this help less fragmentation?or increase speed fram rate speed since cpu is geting the information even faster?

used to i would partion my hard drives into 3 sections . one for windows an window related programs one for page file/swap file an one for everthing else.if windows needed a reinstall id just redo c drive that had windows an reistall the registry.


 

Posted

Marshal_Victory,

About the swap file. There is SOME performance gain by ridding one's self of Virtual Memory. In a nutshell, if Windows CAN swap something off to the swap file, it will. With over 1GB of RAM, there's no point in letting it.

There is a camp on the other side that says this is always a bad idea. But my take on it has always been, reading and writing to a hard drive will never be as fast as reading and writing to RAM, so you might as well leave everything you can in RAM.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Finally, I figured it out. DCOM Server Process Launcher got disabled. That was what was doing it. Bugger me if I know how/why I disabled that, knowing I needed it.


 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Finally, I figured it out. DCOM Server Process Launcher got disabled. That was what was doing it. Bugger me if I know how/why I disabled that, knowing I needed it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great catch, HolyEvilAoD! And duly noted in case anyone ever asks me that question again.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Marshal_Victory,

About the swap file. There is SOME performance gain by ridding one's self of Virtual Memory. In a nutshell, if Windows CAN swap something off to the swap file, it will. With over 1GB of RAM, there's no point in letting it.

There is a camp on the other side that says this is always a bad idea. But my take on it has always been, reading and writing to a hard drive will never be as fast as reading and writing to RAM, so you might as well leave everything you can in RAM.

[/ QUOTE ]

What if you have only 1 GIG of ram? Still disable the swap file?


Level 50s:
BlackSpectre, Dark Defender (Guardian)
Thorin, Invul/Axe Tank (Justice)
Volcano Juice, Fire/Stone Tank
Professor ?, Mind/FF Controller
Stone Forge, Stone/Fire Tank

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
What if you have only 1 GIG of ram? Still disable the swap file?


[/ QUOTE ]

If you have completely streamlined your system so that it is only used for gaming, and you run nothing else in the background while you game, then I'd say go for it. I ran for two weeks on 1GB of RAM with no swap and never noticed any issues.

However, if the computer you game on is used for other applications, especially RAM intensive ones like Photoshop or CAD, then I would leave a swap file in place. Back when I ran one, I set the min/max at 512MB for Virtual Memory.

This really is a case of try it out and see. If you turn it off and problems crop up during long gaming sessions, then turn it back on. If not, fly with it.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Bill Z Bubba gota thank ya for this guide . downloaded drive cleaner an it helped with a driver problem i had since i have had this card ( msi 6600gt 128 ddr3 agp card ).got brave today an turned off Virtual Memory..difrence to me is night an day.realy helped alot in mercy an port oaks .

only thing i belive you could add to your guide would be the physical checking of ones system. dirt , lent ,cat hair,human hair,dust etc all want to go into your comp an clog it up. which can lower performance an raise heat.heat makes fans run harder an wear out faster.

good idea to check fans ever other month or if vid performance drops like a rock. found out my 6 month old cards fan was broke an hanging down from the card. heat was part of its performance problems ( ill never buy another msi card ) .new dont always mean good.

bought a new fan after i did some checking on newegg . an replaced it my self cheeper than what it would cost me for msi to look at it .if you can dodge a wrench you can play dodge ball .. an if you can turn a screw driver you can build a computer.. or fix a vid cards fan as the case may be.so any one can clean the inside with caned air an a clean paint brush as needed.

thanks again for the time an effort put into guide.


 

Posted

Marshal_Victory,

You are absolutely correct. Cleaning out the system monthly SHOULD be in this guide. I'll be sure to add it for Rev 3.

Note to self, also need BIOS tweak section.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

Items missing from this revision that will be in Rev 3:

In your BIOS: set Plug and Play OS to NO. This way, the BIOS won't let the OS override other settings you set in the BIOS.

If you have OVER 1GB of system RAM, AND you are using an AGP video card, set your AGP Aperture for 256MB. If you are at 1GB of RAM, set it for 128MB. Below 1GB, go for 64MB.

And an entire section I left out of this rev:


If you really want to feel your gamer cahones, flash your motherboard's bios to the latest version. (Not for the weak of heart. DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST!)

Extra Tweakage:

XP is bloatware on a huge level. Lots of useless bells and whistles that anyone trying to tweak out a little more performance should nuke. So here we go:

Right click the My Computer icon and choose properties. Go to the Advanced tab and and click on the Settings button under Performance. Set this for Adjust for Best Performance. Hit Apply and then Ok twice.
Right click your desktop where it is touching no icons, choose Properties, go to the Appearance tab and click on Effects. Uncheck everything. Hit Ok, Apply and then Ok.

Things look somewhat different? Good. Move on.

"SOOO much work, Bill! Why do I have to do all of this?" Because Microsoft builds their OSs for people that don't want to do any work. You're a gamer that wants the best for yourself, right? Then get busy! If your hands aren't bleeding yet, you aren't working hard enough!

Lastly, a quick mention on overclocking. Don't do it. Ever.

Unless of course you need to because your performance is too low, AND you know for a fact that the bottlenecks occurring to CAUSE your low performance are DIRECTLY related to the speeds at which your processor, RAM and GPU are running.

If that is the case, OVERCLOCK THIS PUPPY!!! The apps are out there, there are ways to monitor your temperatures, ways to tell when you've gone to far without frying your system, ways to make a once slow system a screaming banshee again. But I'm not here to teach you that. If you want it badly enough, you'll figure it out.

Now game. GAME, YOU FOOLS!

Rev 3 should be out by I-7.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

All good stuff, thanks for this guide.


 

Posted

Been using this, defintely ups my frame rate, but having problems with my system crashing now. What should I do? I'm running a Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig of ram, on an Athlon 3400+

--Jed


 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Been using this, defintely ups my frame rate, but having problems with my system crashing now. What should I do? I'm running a Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig of ram, on an Athlon 3400+

--Jed

[/ QUOTE ]

Turn back on Virtual Memory if you turned it off. It should only be off if you have MORE that 1GB of RAM. If that doesn't fix it, PM me with ALL of your in game and in driver settings as you have them now.


Be well, people of CoH.

 

Posted

i started using gameos from your suggestion in your first tweak thread... gotta say coh loves it..lmao

windows hates it, and i cant go to windows update while im running gameos as my shell, but thats ok, quick reboot and all is well.

the only extra thing ive had to do (to get cov running smoothly) was put shader qaulity (in game) to low


 

Posted

*bows to Bill*

Your kung fu is supreme.


 

Posted

I'm in almost full and complete agreement with everything Bill has said, however, I use Windows 2000 SP 4 for a variety of reasons (It's more stable than XP being my primary reason) including XP's notoriety as bloatware. Nothing I've seen or heard from anyone else, nor my own personal experience has convinced me to switch back to XP (after making the switch from 98 to XP, I eventually moved to 2000 and have been happy here). Yet, every so often I hear claims that XP is better all around. It hogs more resources on startup just to idle (more for windows means less for games) and is less stable. What am I missing?


 

Posted

I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything the BillZ has advised here, save one very important thing:

The Pagefile. Those who think that disabling the pagefile obviously results in a boost in performance on current (2-3GB mem) machines should read the following thread

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...5/r/7680979175

Now I'm an old school Linux dev so I used to think "Virtual Memory" when I saw "Page File" this thread really hit home to me that that two things are so radically different that disabling the Windows pagefile is almost always the wrong thing to do on a machine with current amounts or RAM (I.E. anything under 4GB)

This _is_ counter-intuitive to me and (I'm guessing) to most people but after spending some time on the subject I'm quite sure that disabling the page file does not do what you might think it does and thus does not providde the performance boost you might expect.


 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Yet, every so often I hear claims that XP is better all around. It hogs more resources on startup just to idle (more for windows means less for games) and is less stable. What am I missing?

[/ QUOTE ]

What are you missing? Some bloatware. I'll do some digging around today to see if you're actually "missing" anything. But to be honest, I rather doubt it. I've had more trouble launching some older titles in 2K than XP, but beyond that...

EDIT: Was curious, so here's some reading for us all
One link
"Windows XP has better support for games and comes with more games than Windows 2000." What does this mean? Why does it have better game support? Both OSes can run DirectX9.0c, so what is 2K missing? In my quick search this morning, I'm not finding much. The funny part of it is, by doing the work to yank all of XP's bells and whistles, you end up with a slightly updated, retooled Win2K.

That said, from the scuttlebutt I'm hearing so far, those of us with 32bit procs should just sit on XP/2K, and those with 64bit procs should move on to Vista.

[ QUOTE ]
The Pagefile. Those who think that disabling the pagefile obviously results in a boost in performance on current (2-3GB mem) machines should read the following thread

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a debate that will not die. And it probably shouldn't die.
Here's what my last round of testing pagefile/swapfile/virtualmemory settings provided:

Virtual Memory enable for let Windows manage on primary system partition: 3DMark2K5 crashes
VM disabled across both partitions: No problems
VM enabled on 2nd partition, Windows Managed, got about 10 more points in 3DMark2k5.
VM enabled on Pri or 2nd partition at a set 1024MBmin/max size, no problems with performance about the same as the other settings.

Here is my current running opinion of how the swap works:
Virtual Memory, itself, can not be disabled. It's core to the way MS codes their OS. The Swap File CAN be disabled. Completely. Windows will just use RAM for Virtual and Regular memory usage. Writing to a hard drive is slower than writing to RAM.

Disabling VM on all drives doesn't cause me any problems, therefore I'll continue to do it. However, I have 2GB of RAM and a single drive. ( A slower drive than I thought I had put in there.) It does appear that allowing the swap to remain on the system partition AND managed by Windows causes problems. (And this is the default setting for XP.) It APPEARS that the best performance would be by having the swap enabled, managed by windows, on an entirely separate physical drive than the OS.


Be well, people of CoH.