re permanaent swap file with dos dbldisk in article hydra gatech edu gt c prism gatech edu james dean barwick writes more on permenent swap files i m sure everyone who has an uncompressed part of their compressed hard disk has seen the message you have selected a swap file greater than the suggested size windows will only use the size suggested do you wan t to create this swap file anyway or something like that well a friend of mine robert called microsoft and asked them what and why what they said is that windows checks the amount of free disk space and divides that number by then it checks for the largest contiguous block of free disk space windows then suggests the smaller of the two numbers they also said that under absolutely no circumstances none will windows uses a swap file larger than the suggested size well that s what he said i call bull if this is true why does windows report the memory is available to me if it s not going to use it i think the support droid was malfunctioning and confused the disk space limit with the virtual address space limit as far as the disk is concerned you are limited only by the amount of contiguous free space the limit that causes the message windows will only use is the amount of virtual address space that the virtual memory manager will create and this is a function of the amount of free memory that you have when windows starts in the enh section of system ini you can specify a parameter pageovercommit multiplier the following description is from the windows resource kit this entry specifies the multiplier what determines the amount of linear address space the vmm will create for the system which is computed by rounding up the amount of available physical memory to the nearest mb and then multiplying that value by the value specified for pageovercommit increasing this value increases the amount of available linear address space causing the size of data structures to increase this also increases paging activity proportionately and can slow down the system you can specify a value between and the default is to change this entry you must edit system ini bob nichols at t bell laboratories rnichols ihlpm ih att com
