I have a P3 1ghz box with 512mb or ram. I have never exceeded 200mb of memory usage and am now on a mission to disable the swap file altogether. Back in the good ole days of NT4 we could set the swapfile size to 0, then create some file in system32 (forgot the filename) which stopped NT from creating any swap file. My question.. how do I hack 2000 so it does not swap anything to the hard drive? I've set my swapfile size to 16mb but windows insists on creating a 130mb swapfile!!!! I've set DisablePagingExecutive to 1 in the registry but Task Manager shows Kernel Memory - Paged at 30mb. The most frustrating part about all of this is that I have 300mb of ram sitting unutilized! Can I disable ALL use of the swapfile under 2000? I will never need more than 200mb of ram on this machine. It only runs Outlook, IE, Excel, and Word. How about creating a 256mb ramdrive and storing my swapfile on it? Has anyone tried something like this? Dan

Yes, people have created the swap on RAM drives and that is the only way to get teh swap removed from your HD. You must have a swap set and I have never heard of a way to disable it in 2K. There are some sites with articles about doing the ramdrive thing but i can't remember off the top of my head. Just know that you may actually hurt performance by creating a ramdrive especially using half your ram. Less free memory (~56MB) will cause 2k to swap more often as it tries to maintain more free mem. Swaping in ram is faster but it may slow our system down overall, especially as you push your mem usage towards 256MB.

Why did you waste $1000 on a nice system when a Pentium 166 laptop would work fine for you. You obviously did not set the swap file size or it would have saved it. I have been successful setting it to whatever size I wanted on all of my systems.

Maybe I'm crazy, but.....isn't the swapfile where Windows places information from RAM when it needs to free that RAM to be used by something else? How can this occur if the swapfile is in a ramdrive? You're swapping RAM into RAM, which leaves less RAM available and increases the need for swapping.

There is no way in 2000 to kill the pagefile. In XP I believe you can disable it, but the big question is, why would you want to? Is your hard drive that small? There are some 2000 services that rely on the pagefile, as I understand it, disabling the pagefile would mess them up and create problems with your setup. There are also some app's that rely on the pagefile and disabling it would not be beneficial to your system running properly.

I've just started studying for my MCSE, and I remember seeing this. The pagefile is only reserved for overflow purposes only. You have 512 ram, load Outlook, type a letter, visit a porn site...so your system is using up, say 80 megs ram? In the meantime this thread is dragging on why the sky is blue. I think the built in mem manager knows not to go to the hdd unless it sees the ram approaching its limit and it will need to shift some less used instructions over to the drive to keep space open on the ram for more critical apps, like porn.

I believe you need a pagefile if you want the system to create a dumpfile for debugging.