Windows 95 seems to be giving my hard disk a hard time. Even when I have no applications open, the drive often spontaneously starts grinding away for about 20 seconds for no apparent reason. I have 16Mb of RAM and a large swap file, and I defragment the drive every few days. Since I have so much RAM installed, I tried fixing the problem by disabling the swap file, but I just get "out of memory" messages when I try to run more than a couple of small applications. Is something wrong with my Windows configuration?
- Rick Channing
No, but you've discovered that Windows 95's dynamic swap file is a restless beast. When there's no virtual memory swap file, Windows takes up as much as 12Mb of RAM just for itself, which is why you run out of memory quickly when the swap file is disabled. Most of the grinding you're hearing is Windows reducing the size of the swap file during periods of low memory usage. With no applications running and 16Mb of RAM, Windows waits for a moment of inactivity, then starts shrinking the swap file down to free disk space.
Unless disk space is tight, you can minimise this activity by increasing the minimum size of the swap file to about 20Mb. To do so, double-click the System icon in the Control Panel, click the Performance tab in the System Properties dialogue box, and click the Virtual Memory button. In the Virtual Memory dialogue box, select Let me specify my own virtual memory settings, enter 20 in the Minimum field, then click OK, Yes and Close. When you restart Windows, your swap file will be much less agitated.
- Scott Spanbauer
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Category: Win95
Issue: Feb 1997
Pages: 166
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Stop Windows 95's hard disk aerobics