Compact Flash as Hard Drive

[bpalone]

My question is: Should I be concerned about temp files and other writes to the CF card?

If so, could someone offer some suggestions as to what to do and hopefully some guidance as how to do it? I have forgotten most of what I knew about DOS and have become a GUI weanie. Which is odd, as I came into the GUI world kicking and screaming.

This for an old Compaq Presario 1600 XL laptop, that has JBL sound system. The primary use is to play my music and a movie once in a while. It has a double purpose of being an emergancy back-up unit in the event my main laptop were to go T.U. while out on the road on a project. This past year it would of seen quite a bit of use, but will probably only see 3 to 4 months out of a year use in a normal year.

Running 98se, 196 meg ram, 500 Mhz Pentium. Currently only has OS, programs (WordPerfect, etc) and music files on it. I want to copy it over to another CF card to have as a backup to slide in when it does fail. That will be done with GParted Live. But, before I make that image I want to have all my tweaks in place.

Thanks in advance. This place is the goto place for good information.

[jaclaz]

There is a recent thread (not Win9x) related:

where you may get anyway some info.

Have you considered the idea of running with NO page file?

How much RAM is actually used by the system in "normal" operation?

Which "kind" (i.e. in which occasion) are "temp" files created?

How big in size they can be?

196 Mb on a Windows 98 machine should be enough to run setting aside a small RAM disk for "temp"....

jaclaz

[loblo]

Using a RAM drive you should be able to put the swap and temp folders out of the Flash drive but you'll remain with constant writes to the registry dat files which as far as I know cannot be relocated from the windows dir.

[rloew]

Using a RAMDisk as a Swap file will accomplish nothing unless you have more RAM than Windows recognizes. You would be better off disabling Swap and not using the RAMDisk..

[loblo]

Well, some applications such as MS Office 2000 programs or Corel Painter won't start here if there is no swap file, no matter how much RAM there is and even though they never need to use it.

[TmEE]

Office 2000 runs fine here without swapfile, Corel Draw does nag me every time when you start it about missing swapfile, but it runs. I would not really worry about temp and stuff on 9x, unless you use some program that loves to create them and you know it, which in that case a small RAMdisk for TMP might be a good idea.

[bpalone]

Thanks for the input. Just disabled the swap/page file. Word 2K and Excel 2K both loaded without a whimper. So.... I guess I'll just go without having a swap/page file. We'll see how long a card lasts. The smaller (storage capacity) IDE laptop drives are getting harder to find and then you may end up going the used route. If a card will last a reasonable amount of time, then for $15 to $17 a pop for an 8 gig card isn't too bad a price.

Thanks again.

[jumper]

My DIY 2GB 60x SSD experiment from two years ago:

P2-350 booted Win98se to desktop faster than the 10GB HDD I cloned the system from.