mathcad swap file reposting and summarizing for your information or additional comment this is long i have mb of memory on my sx mhz an intel math coprocessor and a mb hard drive with mb free no compression i have been running mathcad under windows in enhanced mode with a mb ram drive mb mb smart drive and no swap file permanent or temporary for several months i am interested in the faster mathcad but i am concerned about reported swap file requirements and the legitimacy of mathsoft s claim about increased speed to sx users will mathcad run without a swap file or insist that i use a swap file so far in response to a less detailed description of my setup or in unrelated postings the more informed answers on the net or by e mail appear to be by fuess llnl gov david a fuess according to mathsoft no mathcad uses the swap file extensively so as not to overburden the physical resources they say this is actually a win s feature a figure of mb was indicated to me as a minimum but you might try anyway by bert tyler satalink com bert tyler i m not all that certain that mathcad is the culprit here i have a dx with mb of main memory less mb for a ramdisk and a bit for a dos session that is opened as part of the startup process which i have been running without any swapfile when i installed the win s subsystem from the march beta of the nt sdk the win s subsystem itself demanded the presence of a swapfile the only win s program i ve run to date is the bit version of freecell that came with that subsystem i gave windows a small temporary swapfile i m leery of files that must remain in fixed locations on my hard disk and all seems well by bca ece cmu edu brian c anderson what is win i upgraded to mathcad and it installed a directory for win under windows system during the upgrade it told me that win was required by case student tc umn edu steven v case mathcad makes use of the win s libraries you ve probably heard about win s it is a bit windows library that provides much of the windows nt functionality no support for threads and multitasking and such but can be run under windows by rhynetc zardoz chem appstate edu thomas c rhyne i also have mb of ram and indeed mathcad insisted on a permanent swapfile it would not run otherwise by bishop baeyer chem fsu edu greg bishop mathcad absolutely requires mb ram with mb swap file or mb ram with mb swap file it will give you a not enough memory error if the swap file is less than mb it is a major resource hog if you do not load the symbolic processor or the smart math it takes about mb of ram real or virtual just to load again due to the win s libraries so it seems that in addition to the system requirements shown on mathsoft s advertisement for that you need a swap file possibly as big as mb looks like i would just need an mb swap file and would need to choose or can i between a faster permanent swap file or a slower temporary swap file apparently a win subsystem ships with mathcad how much disk space does this require i also received these answers by mfdjh uxa ecn bgu edu dale hample if you ve got megs of ram why not configure megs as a ram disk for mathcad dos permits different bootup configurations can mathcad win be configured to use such a ram drive instead of a swap file if not i don t see how using dos for an alternate bootup would provide windows with this swap file some time back i remember a discussion about the issues of using a ram drive to support a swap file but i thought this involved slower mb systems i have dos but for various reasons have not yet done a full installation by the way is a full installation of dos required to avail oneself of the alternate bootup feature which files from the installation disks are required by wild access digex com wildstrom presumeably you mean without a permanent swap file if windows needs a swap file it will upo and create one if a permanent one doesn t exist permanent is generally faster though i don t know why mathcad wouldn t be happy with either type ver is and so should any program conforming to the win specification so far mb has been enough ram to avoid the overhead of running any swap file i have been running mathcad under windows without one
