2.5 times ram for Swap File MANDATORY! Well at least double the size you wanted it to be. This one is for you tweakers, speed freaks and computer experts. If you don't like messing with windows settings, or don't know what virtuam memory is, then you dont need to worry (unless your game is crashing every time you use it ). I used a small swap file size to test this ( why not it makes the games crash faster) and Civilization 3 so it would max out my old system. 128 mb ram , 200mhz CPU . No matter what size I set my Virtual Memory to stay at ( 32 all the way to 64 ), windows crashed the game at precisely half the size of the swap file. At 33 MB in use, the game started missing some features and acting weird. At 37 ( half size) the game exits with " Illegal Operation Error". In Gates-ese this is " You ran out of memory ". so it's time to re-start the computer. Here's why From Windows Q89141 windows initializes your virtual memory {at startup} to one half the size of your hard drive's free space. From Infogrames Interactive ( Civ3's manufacturer) . If you are letting Windows handle the swap file, it will only permit half the available hard disk space to be used for Virtual Memory, so if free space on the disk becomes less than twice the amount of RAM, you could get weird problems. Windows reads your virtual memory settings to determine hard dirve free space. Under default settings , free space is reported to the virtual memory manager. When you set your own virtual memory numbers, No Matter What Number You Want To Use Windows will max-out the system and crash at precisely HALF this number, because it sees virtual memory maximum as your free space. I have not seen any way to over-ride this behavior, so we may be stuck with it. That means the old proverb " 2.5 times your RAM " might be true. What is exact here is. Take the size of the swap file you want , DOUBLE IT, and enter this for your maximum virtual memory. 2.5 times ? Not really, but why not ? it may help prevent a crash if you have even 1 extra MB over that double.
what's on the hard drive. Oh yeah and this. The number in Virtual memory will still be the space taken up on your hard drive. So if you type in 256 MB this space will still be gone on the hard drive, even if windows can only use half of that. ( Thanks Uncle Bill ) Weather for Indiana February 16 , 2003. Why not just call it the Big Chill, or the Nippy Era ? All I'm saying is , how do you know it's an ice age? Because.. Of All ... THE ICE !!!! ?
