The subject has been raised several times recently of how to get faster
access to files and better performance when scanning huge files. This is
for Windoze folks, so Mac users can delete this message now. ;)
Have a look at the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q123747 titled "Moving
the Windows NT Default Paging and Spool File". It explains how to move
the virtual memory files and printer spool files in NT4 and Win2K to a different
drive. What this allows you to do is arrange your computer so that different
physical drives are performing different functions. If data is being read
from and written to different drives rather than the same drive, access
should be faster. For instance, you could set up your computer with three
ATA drives - one for the OS and applications, and the other two connected
to an ATA RAID controller to store all the working files - data, virtual
memory, PS scratch space, printer spool space etc. It would probably take
some experimentation to work out the best arrangement of what is where.
Anyhow, food for thought for those of you who are getting bored waiting
for 50MB scans to load or save, or those who want to scan larger format
images.
I was under the misapprehension that the Windows swap file had to be on
the same drive as the OS. This is definitely NOT true for NT generation
OS's (NT 3.51, NT4.x, Win2K).
Rob
PS Yes, you could do the same thing with SCSI and get better performance,
but I am talking best bang for the buck.
Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
