Reply 20 of 22, by Rincewind42
Yes, you do. Some programs will seriously misbehave on Win98 if the swap file is disabled, regardless of the amount of free memory. Proof:
I've just wasted about an hour trying to get Sanitarium to work. The game consistently got stuck after the intro sequence in a weird way: the background ambient sound kept playing normally with the first few milliseconds of the voiceover being stuck in a loop over it. At this point only a hard reset helped. Tried all sorts of updates, NoCD cracks, etc. to no avail. Then in my desperation I thought, hey, what if I re-enable the swap file? Bammm, the game started working right away flawlessly!
After this I ran into another game, Nocturne, that seems to run fine with the swap file disabled (only tried it for about 5 minutes, though), but it informs you in no uncertain terms at the start screen that this is in fact a very bad idea, and the game needs at least 200 Mb of virtual memory, otherwise you might run into stability problems.
I have 512 MB RAM in this Win98SE box, so I disabled the swap file as a misguided attempt to prolong the life of the SSD. But then I'll only use this machine a few hours per week on average (well, long term it will be probably even lower than that, to be realistic), so who cares about the life span of the SSD, really... A 120GB SSD costs like two lunches these days (quite cheap lunches, actually). And I'm not gonna live forever either 😀
DOS: Soyo SY-5TF, MMX 200, 128MB, S3 Virge DX, ESS 1868F, AWE32, QWave, S2, McFly, SC-55, MU80, MP32L
Win98: Gigabyte K8VM800M, Athlon64 3200+, 512MB, Matrox G400, SB Live
WinXP: Gigabyte P31-DS3L, C2D 2.33 GHz, 2GB, GT 430, Audigy 4