Best choice for swap file, Windows XP and 4GB RAM

[andy.m]

I am going to build a new PC with 4GB RAM, a SSD system drive and a traditional mechanical hard disk for data. The OS will be Windows XP 32 bit. I am going to use it almost exclusively with Ableton Live. Which is the best choice for the swap file: no swap file, swap file on SSD, swap file on mechanical hard disk?

[ghast]

ssd's still suffer from limited write cycles and way slower write speed than hd's. with swap files being very write intensive, my guess would be to put the swap on the 1st(outermost) partition on a HD (uncle leo says it spins faster out there). It also seems to make sense to have a dedicated drive, whose heads are only being used for swap. What I do is use the 1st partition on a 2 partition drive, where the 2nd partition is only used for back up. I am not an expert, however.I also like to put swaps all over the place and let winblows figure it out, hehe.

[andy.m]

I know that a separate temp drive would be optimal, but a separate machanical hard disk is noisy, and power consuming.

Does it make sense not to have a swap file at all with Windows XP and 4GB RAM?

[nebulae]

XP needs a swap file, even if it's not using much of it. You can still get out of memory error messages and what not. I have run a system without a swap file, and I get strange errors from time to time. If you're worried about space, you can simply have 512mb dedicated to swap. If you're worried about read/write issues, try it without any swap, and you should be fine, minus the random error messages.

Either way, with 4gb on XP, even though you'll only see about 3.3gb, your system will run really well.

[andy.m]

Thanks for the tip! I'll try a swap file on the mechanical hard disk (SSD are not well suited to host swap files), and I'll experiment with having no swap file at all.

[stutter]

since you have 4gb of RAM, which likely won't all be accessible by Windows XP 32bit, you could set up a RAM disk which can access the additional RAM, and then set that as your swap file. I'm afraid I don't know enough about this to provide evidence (i.e. benchmarks) to indicate how effective this will be.

[andy.m]

How do I set up such a RAM disk?

[djsynchro]

A RAM disk would be still be a program that runs under 32 bit XP which can't access more than 3 point something Gig so that won't work...

[adventurepants_]

On a new machine (ie core7, quad core 775), youre not going to see a lick of difference from doing anything to your swap file.

Try the different methods if you like and do some benchmarks, youll see a negligible difference in any of the ways you can set it up. My advice is to leave it as standard and get on with music! Similarly a RAM disk wont help. None of these things will make any difference to the amount of tracks of audio you can run. Youll be better placed spending more money on a better audio interface, with better low latency drivers like RME etc than trying to get gains by tweaking RAM.

and Win 32 can see up to 3.75GB of RAM, depending on Video card configuration.

[nebulae]

^but there's no way to set how much your video card will reserve for itself, right?

[stutter]

Ramdisks seem capable of accessing memory beyond the 3.whatever that xp 32bit can make use of (although I believe xp's physical address space is 4gb - so only up to 4gb, e.g. that which is missed due to graphics cards).
In which case if someone has 4gb of RAM, some of which can't be seen, then a free, easily installed program which allows usage of the wasted memory seems quite useful to me. Google. If it will not provide any benefit as a swap file, you could try to set it to load your most used samples.
Neb, I don't think you can set how much memory your video card will reserve.

I don't dispute what _adventurepants has said though, you're probably better off making music, and an i7 with a good spec is probably going to be unrecognisably faster than your previous machine

[adventurepants_]

^but there's no way to set how much your video card will reserve for itself, right?

On some built in GPUs with shared memory, you can set how much system Ram it will use. Ive been doing some reading on this and it seems that XP will hold back some system RAM for IRQ allocation, and isnt related to video RAM. I built a new machine for someone on the weekend with a 1GB GPU, and they still had 3.75GB of system RAM available.

[nebulae]

On my lappie, with an integrated card, I have 3.5gb of available ram. On my desktop, with a 512mb card, I get 3.25gb. No big deal, since both amounts are way more than I'll need anytime soon. But just too bad that I can get to use it all.

In any case, I've been running both systems without any Page file, and no issues at all.