i am doing some work on my computer to try and regain some of its lost power and i read somewhere that deleting the windows swap file in DOS mode, and then when i rebooted to windows the swap file would be recreating, but it would be brand new. I heard the old one gets fragmented and deleting it and creating a new one would speed things up a bit. i checked this out w/ my dad and he said he thought that this would create some "entry problems" and some file allocation problems. is this true? will deleting a swap file cause any problems? maybe he is just thinking back to the MSDOS 5.0 and Win3.1 days, those were when he was the most knowledgable w/ computers...

The swap file is managed by Windows unless you move it to a separate partition on a second hard drive devoted to this only.You need to defrag the computer frequently if the swap file is on the C drive like it is normally.Install Enditall to help you speed up the defrag and stop the restarts.This program will close the programs that are not to be run with defrag.You run it and exit this program and then start defrag.Do not tamper with or remove the swap file:it has to be there.That is the way Windows works.It moves the data back and forth while it is running all the opened programs.This is done first by using the RAM and then the swap file if the burden is too large.Leave room on the C drive to accomodate the swap file.About 1 to 1.5 Go is enough at all times.A used drive of 2-3 Go can be used to move the swap file to it and eliminate the need to defrag so frequently.In the Control Panel under System/performance/Virtual Memory you will find the section to make the manual settings if you ever move the swap file to a second hard drive.Do not move it to a second partition on the same drive:you would slow down Windows tremendously and overall performance would be deteriorated.Good luck. http://moonsims.asi.org/sandshifter/zips/enditall.zip

Feel free to delete the swapfile at the DOS level, but it will have no positive affect on performance. It "could" have a negative affect because the new file "could" reside farther to the inside of the disk which is slower.

I always read the swapfile should be kept on partition on the drive where Windows is installed, that performance would degrade if on a separate hard drive. I have never done either though. I have a permanent swapfile set up, 384MB max and min. It is never used anymore (AFAIK), I have conservative swapfile use enabled with 512MB RAM installed.(easy to enable/disable conservative swapfile use with Cacheman from Outertech.com) It used to work well though when I just had 256MB RAM installed, I permitted Norton Speed Disk (advanced defrag) to move the swapfile to the outside edge of the hard drive for what Norton called "faster access". Always ran games smoothly though (back when you could get games for a 16MB graphics card), runs older games even better since the RAM upgrade and conservative swapfile use enabled. I'm afraid my power supply wouldn't support a new graphics card, can't afford anything like that right now anyway.

Just wanted to add that if you try Cacheman, don't run it in the background or at startup (options within Cacheman's interface), it will defeat the purpose. Use its' settings only, they are in effect when the program is not running.