Win XP tip boosts F@H frame rate

[sbohdan]

browsing the net I came across a post I thought would be useful to HL members having in mind our folding team as well as those who do not FOLD yet:

Just recently I came across this little Win-XP tip. http://gottatopic.com/?p=149

It made a good deal of sense to me, since over a year ago I had lost a HDD due to virtual memory paging too often.
The best part about this tip is to remove the "Paging File" off of the C-drive onto another system drive as long as it's not a split partition drive, but a real separate drive.

Save Valuable Boot Time On Windows XP

Starting the computer and having to wait for that Windows loading screen can get irritating. However, there is a trick that you can use to speed it up dramatically. This trick is done by moving the Virtual Memory from the system hard drive to any other hard drive. Unfortunately, this only works if you have two or more physical hard drives (not virtual/partition):

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Right click on My Computer and then Properties. Choose the Advanced tab.
2. Click the first Settings Button under Performance. Click on the Advanced Tab on the new window that pops up.
3. Click Change under Virtual Memory
4. Select the hard drive that is not the system drive, to move the virtual memory onto it.
5. Click Custom Size. Set both values to be around twice the RAM that is currently in your computer. For example, if you have 1GB of RAM, set the size to 2048 (1GB = 1024 MB). Click Set.
6. Select the hard drive which had the virtual memory on it (the system hard drive) and click No Paging File. Then, click Set.
7. Click OK to the rest of the windows. Restart your computer. Done.

Note: This might not work after the first reboot. Give it some time. There are cases where this decreased the boot time from around 10 seconds to 3-5 seconds.


ALSO ...
To adjust for Best Performance.

1. Right click on My Computer and then Properties. Choose the Advanced tab.
2. Click the first Settings Button under Performance. Click on the Visual Effects on the new window that pops up.
3. Select the Adjust For Best Performance.
4. Click OK to the rest of the windows. Restart your computer. Done.

If you don't like the adjustment that makes windows look like 98SE, you can Custom tune the settings there to your liking. But, anything you give back to free up resources helps the overall system.

SO ...
After these tips, my frame rate on the current F@H job went from 15m:38s to 11m:48s. My son did this on his laptop and noticed an improvement right away with his F@H job as well. He once asked me why have two hard drives in a computer vs. just one big one. Now he knows the answer. His desktop only has one drive, but a small 4Gb drive may help his F@H if it becomes the Page File and Virtual Memory drive.

tried it and it works.

[gvblake22]

I've been doing that ever since I got two HDD's. I don't really notice a difference, but I also haven't bothered to benchmark it (like with F@H).

[screwballl]

my secondary hard drive always have linux on it... may have to repartition it the next time I reinstall to give a 5GB portion to the windows swap file.

[sbohdan]

I'm using it 2 days now and it seems to me that it is faster and not just folding but overall