What is the Windows swap file for?
Most people think when they have Windows, they have the capability to run several programs at the same time and if they get lots of memory the computer will be fast and run great, – – WRONG! First of all, if you research computer memory you will find that getting anything over 1gig is really a waste of money. For instance, let’s say you are using Microsoft Word and Excel. Windows needs a swap file, which is contiguous disk space and roughly two and one half times the size of the memory in the computer. If you are in Word and you want to switch over to Excel, the computer first of all looks at what files are in memory used for running Word. It now saves that information to the swap file. Next it unloads the program. Now it goes back to the swap file to see what had been loaded when Excel was running. It then goes to the hard drive, locates the files, loads them in memory, and resumes operation of Excel. When you understand how this process works and you see how fast the computer switche
