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Originally Posted by Mr. K6
Center of the disk map. IIRC, this is the beginning (outside) of the second platter of the hard drive, yes?
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No, all modern hard drives stripe their files across platters (so that parts of the file are read in parallel by all the available read/write heads), so the files of the first partition are located at the edge of the available physical disk platters, where the transfer rate is highest.
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No, it is correct, you just refuted yourself  . Note that I said XP will get "cranky." Which it will. |
No, I haven't, and no, it won't.
There is a difference between XP hick-upping, and some silly piece of software (written by a Mac-only software shop, too...) giving out useless wanrning messages.
XP couldn't care less how large the paging file is, and literally so. As far as the OS' memory management is concerned, all that the presence or absence of the page file does is increase or decrease the total pool of virtual memory you have available. In other words, a system with 1Gig RAM and 1Gig pagefile will look exactly identical to XP, from that perspective, to a system with 2Gigs of memory and no page file.
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| If you dont have a small page file on the XP partition/disk/whatever, you'll get random error messages and slowdowns. |
I have been running one of my machines without a page file since April 2002, and I have never seen any error messages, or slowdowns,
ever. That machine (an Inspiron 8200, in case it matters) was my primary work machine for a couple of years, and was used an average of 8 hours a day, running lots of different programs, including Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Matlab, Visual Studio, etc., etc.
I am not aware of any situation where the lack of a page file would prompt error messages (other than running out of memory, of course, but that can happen with or without a page file). I would be more than curious if you could document any of those fabled cases...
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| Large page files are disastrous for the hard drive as they fragment the hell out of it. Further more they are a useless waste of space. Do some field work and you'll see what I mean. |
My guess is that I have done a lot more field work than you imagine...
Anyway, page file fragmentation can be prevented in various ways, first and foremost simply by using a fixed-size page file. If you are really concerned about that, you can create a separate partition exclusivley for the page file. And as I said, there are scenarios were you
must have a page file that exceeds the amount of physical memory you have. If you have 2Gigs of RAM,
in these scenarios, then you need a page file larger than that, see my previous post.
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| The partitioning utility on the XP CD isn't that great. |
Sure, but so what? It does all it needs to do.
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| First off, the quick format doesn't really erase data |
Why would you care? Unless you have security reasons, why would you care what the unused bits on your hard drive say? There is otherwise absolutely no practical reason, at least on a known good drive, to use the long format. The only benefit of the long format is that you get an additional bad-sector check for free, but with modern hard drives that a) are perfectly capable of managing bad sectors on their own, and b) rarely develop bad sectors in the first place (unless they really have a lot of mileage on them), there is really no reason to fret about that.
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| but I need to finish this semester first. |
Allright, good to see that you have your piorities straight
Also, keep kicking a in CS:S. 
).
