Colin's Tip #2: Okay, there are several things you can do to Windows 98SE just to make it run a little faster... The first thing is to set your swapfile to 2x your physical RAM size. For instance, this machine has 256 MB of RAM installed, so I set the swapfile to 512 MB in size.

You can find your "Virtual Memory" options menu if you rightclick on the "My Computer" icon, then go to the "Advanced Tab."

While we're in the System Properties window, if you click the "File Systems" button, you'll get this window.

Colin's Tip #3: Next go to the "Start" menu then "Run." Inside there, type SYSEDIT and press enter. It'll bring up the a few various windows inside the System Configuration Editor. Search for the "System.ini" window and bring it into focus.

Under the [386Enh] section, type ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 . What this does is forces Windows to use your system memory before it goes to the swapfile. Since RAM access times are measured in ns (Nano Seconds), while even the fastest IDE drives run at about 8 ms (Milli Seconds) this speeds things up considerably.

When we compare these two types of memory, hard drives are as slow as snails.