Just a little addendum to what what wrote, most of which is accurate and helpful. It is advantageous to keep your swap file off of the same drive as your systems files. Actually the best-case-scenario is to spread the swap file across as many physical drives as possible without using the system files drive at all. Now unless you are running a server class machine with multiple HDD's this is not a realistic option, and neither is spanning the swap file across multiple partitions of one physical drive. The latter is definitely a no-no. For hardcore NT'ers, never put your pagefile (swap file) on a drive that is mirrored or has fault tolerance enabled. The swap file does not require fault-tolerance, and drives with this enabled are much slower than other drives. I have a main drive of 80 gigs that is partitioned into 5 16 gig drives. One drive is for Poser, Bryce, and Photoshop only. I have a seperate install of Poser on another partition just to install/test/whatever things to make sure they install correctly/work properly/don't suck befoe installing them into my working Poser application. This helps keep the size of my working Poser directory under control. Also, most importantly, I have a seperate, physical 30 gig 7200RPM drive that has nothing installed on it and exits only to hold my swapfile. The difference is system performance is amazing. Hope this helps is some way. :)