Before I muck about with hours of experimentation, I have two nagging questions about using XP that I'll bet practical people have totally nailed down.

1. Have you ever tried putting the whole operating system in memory? It says it takes 500MB of RAM minimum and then it should run faster. The question is, does it really make any noticable difference and/or does it slow down other programs?

2. Do you partition your hard drives so the operating system is in one partition and programs or data in others? I read that things run faster with partitions, but I've always used one big partition for everything. Is there some strategy that makes any difference?

I'm guessing that the differences may be small, but it is just that: a guess. Anyone with experience knows a lot more than my guess. TIA

ardi

Regarding your first question, although complicated, loading an os or application in the Ram is somewhat of a complicated process, and for the most part requires alternative hardware to work right. I have seen Operating systems and particular applications work strictly off the ram, and they were very fast! YEt it is a very expencive and complicated process for it all to work out properly...

As for your second question, partitions are a very effective way to keep your system runing fast and safe, i highly reccommend partitoning out the first 4 gigs or a drive for the os and using the remaining for games and software, this cuts down defrag times and also seperates software for the system dirs, which can be great for futeure formating, without the loss of the OS

=Drew

Only just found this and posted it:

http://www.msfn.org/comments.php?catid=1&id=2118

Should prove to be useful in speeding up XP by a large margin.

Hmmm. I wonder where I got the goofy idea that you could load the os into memory with a simple setting? Maybe I'm losing it. But I even remembered the memory requirements. Oh well.

Regarding partitions on drives, your answer was perfect for me. The straight skinny from a user. Next time I bring up a system I'll set aside 4GB for the os and leave another partition or two for everything else.

Thanks

ardi

Partition could make the system slower also, as the disk is only divided virtually, but you will always have the same number of drive heads no matter what.

I just run two hdds one for os and one for games.