Windows 95/98/ME
2. Why does windows keep
wildy accessing my hard drive for no apparent reason?
Lots of users have complained,
that while using their PC, Windows goes off on to a planet
of its own seizing up for up to a minute because of random,
pointless disk activity which is due to the way that windows
is set to handle disk caching and virtual memory. Although
windows instructs you to "let Windows handle disk cache
settings" for best results, this obviously does not
give the best results.
You can stop windows randomly
accessing the hard drive and improve the performance of
your system. There are a number of ways to combat this:
Windows Virtual Memory
Right click on My Computer,
and select Properties.
Click the Performance tab, and then click Virtual Memory
Choose Let me specify my own virtual memory settings.
If you want to choose a different drive for your swapfile,
run Disk Defragmenter first.
Specify the same value for the Minimum size and the Maximum
size, so windows won't spend so much time resizing the file.
A good size is roughly 2 1/2 times the amount of installed
RAM (i.e. create a 40MB swapfile if you have 16MB of RAM).
Press OK, and then OK again, and confirm that you want to
restart your computer.
Defragmenting the Swapfile
Once you've set the swapfile
size to be constant you won't have to worry about a fragmented
(broken up) swapfile again.
However, you'll need to defragment it at least once for
it to remain that way in the future.
If you have more than one
partition or hard disk in your system, defragment all drives
first. Then, move the swapfile to another drive, defragment
the first one, and then move it back.
Although it's also possible to disable the swapfile entirely
while you defragment the drive (and then re-enable it so
it will be recreated whole), it isn't advisable because
windows may not start without a Swapfile.
Virtual Cache (Only for
those that have more than 16Mb of Memory)
Open SYSTEM.INI for editing.
Add the following two lines to the [vcache] section (If
it's not there then add the section)
MinFileCache=4096
MaxFileCache=4096
These values, in kilobytes, regulate the size of the VCache,
so you can stop it from filling up all available RAM and
paging all loaded apps to disk. If you have more than 16
MB of RAM, then set the above values (both of them) to about
25% of the amount of installed RAM.
RAM
If you can afford it, add more
memory. The more memory you have, the less frequently windows
will use your hard disk, and the better your system performance
will be.
