I wrote this up a while back (2004?). It's a decent performance boost under XP. It works best if you have a separate physical drive from your system drive, but makes a difference even if you only have one hdd(because of fragmenting and resizing).
Edit: DO NOT DELETE A PARTITION YOU CARE ABOUT!
I was a bit blase about it in the directions, but really, be careful there.
So there's three things you want to do:
1) Partition off a swap drive
2) Remove the recycler bin from that drive
3) Set your swap file up on that drive.
1 is probably the most complicated, and it isn't very.
I'll step by step it from a drive with one partition already installed (probably how a new drive would come)
1) Go to Start-Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management
2) In the pane on the left of the Computer Management window, select the 'Disk Management' tool under the 'Storage' heading.
3) Find your disk. If it has a partition, it will be labeled with that drive letter. Otherwise, it will probably say "unpartitioned space" or something similar.
4) If you already have a partition, you will need to get rid of it. Note here that it's important that you choose the right disk, as this command has results similar to "Format c:"
To get rid of a Partition, right click it and select 'Delete Partition'
5) Add your swap drive. Right click, select new partition, set the size to ~3GB(see note at end) and hit ok. You want the NTFS filesystem if it asks, but that should be the default. Oh, and you want to mount it as a drive. I called mine the S drive and named it 'wap' It shows up as (S)wap. See how clever I am? Anyway, if I say 'S:' from now on, it means whatever drive letter you used.
6) Add a regular partition. Right click the unpartioned space, say new partition, etc. just like before. The only different things this time are that you want to use up the rest of your free space and that you need to choose a different drive letter. I recommend 'D:' because that's pretty much the standard. If you really want to be clever, you can mount this one in a folder, but I really can't recommend that just for general storage. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but managing your free space gets kind of wacky.
7) That's it for this step
2 is probably the easiest.
1) Right click the Recycle Bin on your desktop and select Properties.
2) In the 'Global' tab, select 'Configure Drives Independently' It's the first option at the top
3) Select the (S:) tab (or whatever letter you gave your swap drive)
4) Check the option "Do not move files to the Recycle Bin..." (s only applies to the swap drive, which should never have files on it anyway)
5) That's it. Hit OK and move on.
3 is long, but fairly simple
1) Right click 'My Computer' (in your start menu) and select properties.
2) Go to the 'Advanced' tab.
3) There are three boxed off areas, Performance, User Profiles, and Startup And Recovery. Each of them has a settings button. You want the one in the Performance box. Click it.
4) Got to the 'Advanced' tab in the Performance Options window.
5) There are two sets of radio buttons and a 'Change' button. Click 'Change'
6) You should be in a window labeled 'Virtual Memory' if not, something is wrong.
7) You will see a list of your drives at the top. Select the S: drive. (Or again, whatever you named your swap drive)
8) Select the "custom Size" radio button.
9) In the 'Initial Size' text box, enter 2000. There isn't anything sacred about 2000, it's just approximately 2GB. (you want your swap drive ~1GB larger than your paging file, otherwise windows will complain at you. Since the drive is 3GB, the swap file is 2GB)
10) In the 'Maximum size' text box, enter 2000 (the same number as the initial size)
11) Press the 'Set' button
12) For each of your other drives, Select it from the list at the top, select the 'No Paging File' radio button, then press the 'Set' button.
13) Press OK. You should get an alert notifying you that you need to restart to see your changes.
14) Press ok on the 'Performance Options' window.
15) Press ok on the 'System Properties' window.
16) Reboot. You are done.
**Note about swap file sizes
Microsoft's recommended swap file size is 1.5 x RAM. I find I get an extra performance boost by roughly doubling that. Any more, and there aren't any real benefits though. So for example, if you have 1GB of RAM, anything more than ~3GB of swap is mostly just excessive.
Additionally, I think there may be a maximum amount of swap space windows will actually use at about 4GB. I use a 2GB swap file in this example because it'll work well for anyone who doesn't have obscene amounts of RAM. If you want a different size swap file, go for it, just remember to make your swap drive ~1GB larger than the file.
