Windows without a swapfile

[whabang]

I've been runningn Windows without swapfile for the last week. The performance jump is actually noticable; and my harddrives probably feel a lot better. So far, no applications have complained about the lack of memory, and I generally have around 400 megs of free RAM.
I doubt it would work good on low-memory systems, though.

Has anyone experienced any major difference between 768 and 1024 megs of RAM?.

[whabang]

XP Home.
It handles it much better than Windows 2000 ever did.

[whabang]

KennyR wrote:
It's not something I'd recommend for 24/7 use. AFAIK Windows sometimes uses swap to defrag physical memory. Not too sure about that though.

Well,
you don't truly disable the page-file; you simply make it so small (max 0 mb) that it uses usual RAM instead. It is true that Windows' RAM-handling gets less efficient this way (swapped things get swapped to another place in RAM), but RAM is so much faster than a HD, that you'll think things go faster.

There are ways to disable the swap-file, but this includes serious registry hacking, and will probably {bleep} up your system good.