Some questions for PC experts

[Vaskez]

Yeah as explained above I advised you to turn VM off cos I thought you had XP. Anyway, turning it off is the fastest but as the article I linked above explains, it is only good in limited situation, sorry if I misled you. Anyway, up till now I did have a page file as I don't know how to turn VM off in win 2K (but I do in other windows versions, bah! ). I did as the article I linked advised and put the page file on my 2nd hard disk in its own partition and have noticed some speed up. Especially my shutdown is much quicker. [img]smile.gif[/img] I haven't yet tested it under heavy conditions i.e. with loads of apps running.
That is the next fastest solution after not using VM at all. The solution you are using was probably advised as it is the most STABLE solution, making sure you never run out of VM. If you are looking for speed up that is not a good solution. I have 640MB RAM and 256MB page file on its own partition on a seperate HD to the operating system. This seems to be the best solution and I have noticed speed up but this is with windows 2000.

You also said that you were thinking of getting windows XP. If I were you I'd get 2000 instead. It is just as stable and just as good at resource management. However it has been around for longer and so has better driver support and application support. Basically it has all the significant advantages of XP but not its annoying features, eg. built in MSN and "helpful" layers of menus which just slow experienced users down. 2000 also takes up less HD space.
Either that or do what I'm in the process of doing: get to know Linux and compeltely switch over to that. You can get it free, and choose from over 1000 distributions. All important software is free and you can get Wine which allows you to run windows software on it. I haven't tried it but I know someone who has it on Linux and plays Planescape Torment with it. Heh, sorry about the essay

[Vaskez]

About your other question: there is no "main" resolution setting. Each application sets its own display resolution or uses the desktop one. Before the drivers kick in when windows starts up, I guess the default resolution sets in which is 640x480, or you sure it's 800x600? I guess the new drivers must set the desktop resolution after you've logged in.

[Rokenn]

Some more arcane performance tips for multi-drive systems.

On your motherboard you have 2 IDE buses (the slots you can plug your drive cables into). You can gain some addtional performance by arranging your drives to maximize use of these buses. An IDE bus can support 2 devices, but it can only work one of these devices at a time, ie it sends a request to the drive to get a file and it stops and waits for the file. So... if you have two drives and most of your most performance demanding apps do not require access to your CDROM then you should place the drivess on seperate buses. Be aware that having partitions on the drive does not necessarily increase performance since you can only access one of these partitions at a time. They can be helpful for organizing data and defraging as already mentioned. Also smaller partions have smaller data block sizes, which means the drive space is used more efficiently.
Your swapfile by default is located on your system partition (almost always your C drive). It can be moved to any partition you like though.

One last thing that many folks do not know. Under Win 2k and XP you can mount a new parition to a folder on an existing harddrive, giving you an easy way to increase the size of an existing partition without have to move files around.

Now, if you are using SCSI drives ignore most of the above. As the computer can work with all the devices on the SCSI bus at the same time. Lets say you have three hard drives and CDROM on the same SCSI bus. The computer can request files from all four devices and the pick them up as each devices finds the requested files. While on an IDE bus it would make one request and wait for the results, then make the next request.

[Larry_OHF]

Originally posted by Moiraine: Larry, if your resolution is OK for your desktop, why bother about the login screen resolution ?

Because after I give it the log-in password...the monitor blacks out and has to adjust to the desktop resolution, and there's that "pop" that you get when you are changing resolutions on your monitor, and it takes about 5 seconds longer than it used to for boot-up. It's just annoying, and I don't like that "pop" that comes from resolution fixes...

[ 01-22-2003, 12:43 AM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]