Quoting Niels Petersen to Bob Lawrence in message dated 28 Apr 1996:

 NP> Hi Bob & Neil

 >  BL> Mine does that occasionally in Win31 if I've run many
 >  BL> applications and the VM on disc is getting a good workout. I've
 >  BL> always thought that is was Windows having a virtual wet dream
 >  BL> in virtual memory. I think it is probably cleaning up the
 >  BL> system once the RAM is free again.

 >  NS> But when I've done nothing but boot into Windows? Got me
 >  NS> buggered.

 >   Oh. Mine's never done that. It does it mosty if I'm running a
 > compiler. I sit there thinking about what comes next, and then
 > suddenly the hard drive starts shifting stuff around for no reason at
 > all. If I touch a key it stops... just like it's dreaming.

 NP> I don't know about Win95, but Win 3, 3.1 & 3.11  will react
 NP> diffrently depending on whether the swap file is permanent or
 NP> temporary.

Win95 has a sort of dynamic swap file. You can set the size yourself, but
the book advises to let the OS look after it. 

Theoretically it can expand to the size of your hard drive, but it'd run
like an a snail on sedatives.

 NP> I only use a temp swapfile, and keep my cache at 750k, for the
 NP> above reasons. 

 NP> On all machines I have setup, the _only_ time there is disc
 NP> activity, is when a file is actually read or written, which is how
 NP> it _should_ be. 

Sounds fair. I'll keep this in mind as a change back to Win 3.1 is on the
cards for me 8-)


Cheers,

Neil.

--- timEd/386 1.10