Speeding up computer; dropping swap.

As I’ve written in few posts before, I use IBM Thinkpad T42 for my day to day work. The “forced” operating systems installed is Windows XP Service Pack 2. Unfortunately, the laptop has only 512M of memory, and this often leads to a large “swapping” exercises. We used to “swapping” almost since first hard drives appeared (IBM Winchester was my first one), and we all know how and when it happens.

But this is exactly the problem I’m having – all I do is read email, browse the web, and create documents; sometimes I happen to watch a short movie (or YouTube clip) or listen to music – hardly the most intensive stuff in computing. But it really bugs me to wait for any application to load. Sometimes an applications such as Firefox or Outlook take upto half a minute just to start! And that’s on almost idle system where one or two lite (such as PuTTY or IM) applications are running. This is very irritating, and bugs me more as a current state of things in all systems and in all applications rather than waiting itself.

I’m sure that this behavior while better in other operating systems, is similar in all of them.

So this got me thinking. Today’s memory is cheap. Today’s system are fully capable of handling 4GB of memory. What if I were creating “virtual” volume in memory and mount swap space in it? After all, I use swap for swapping only when system is up. I don’t need it when system is off.

So, I’d equip my system with 4GB memory, giving 2GB of it to the OS, and using the other 2GB as swap space. The intention being eliminating hard drive access as much as possible. Would that work? Would this speed up my system?

Tell me what you think.

-A.

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