appiah4 wrote:

I'm currently installing Windows 95 on a 4GB Compact Flash (as the PC I am using has a BIOS limitation with detecting drives beyond 4GB apparently, and the <4GB drives I have are slow and loud..) and I was wondering if I need to do anything to make sure the OS inflicts less wear and tear on the Compact Flash, particularly because of the pagefile and swap behavior..

I would consider how much you plan on using it. If you're frequently going to be using it for many different things (not just a few games here and there) then it is probably worth looking into further. With infrequent use and mostly just for gaming, it probably wouldn't make any noticeable difference unless the system is very low on memory and you plan on pushing much newer games at it.

From what I understand some CF cards have wear-leveling built in and can be worried about less, but I am not sure where to look to get that information per-card...

Dunno if you really have to worry about swapping on a retro computer that sees relatively little use, but as a good measure, I'm always adding the line...

ConservativeSwapfileUsage = 1

...to the [386Enh] section in System.ini when running the OS off a CF card.

It's of course supposed to reduce the swappiness of the system.
It's unclear to me if it works in W95 or not, only used it in W98SE, but guess it can't hurt to try at least.

kaputnik wrote:

Dunno if you really have to worry about swapping on a retro computer that sees relatively little use, but as a good measure, I'm […]
Show full quote

Dunno if you really have to worry about swapping on a retro computer that sees relatively little use, but as a good measure, I'm always adding the line...

ConservativeSwapfileUsage = 1

...to the [386Enh] section in System.ini when running the OS off a CF card.

It's of course supposed to reduce the swappiness of the system.
It's unclear to me if it works in W95 or not, only used it in W98SE, but guess it can't hurt to try at least.

Googling MS archives turns up that ConservativeSwapfileUsage is defaulted to 1 for Windows 95 (it is defaulted to 0 for Win98 though) but I will add it nonetheless.

I have a CF - to - IDE device too but use it specifically for DOS due to its limitations in writes and speed. It works amazingly well there, though - once I managed to get past the not-booting off the CF problem.

For my Windows 9X systems I ordered several (4 in total) types of SD to IDE devices instead. From what I hear, SD is more robust and has far more possible writes and performs way faster but not all devices will be detected by every BIOS which is why I ordered several types. Maybe it's worth considering for your build as well?

appiah4 wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

Dunno if you really have to worry about swapping on a retro computer that sees relatively little use, but as a good measure, I'm […]
Show full quote

Dunno if you really have to worry about swapping on a retro computer that sees relatively little use, but as a good measure, I'm always adding the line...

ConservativeSwapfileUsage = 1

...to the [386Enh] section in System.ini when running the OS off a CF card.

It's of course supposed to reduce the swappiness of the system.
It's unclear to me if it works in W95 or not, only used it in W98SE, but guess it can't hurt to try at least.

Googling MS archives turns up that ConservativeSwapfileUsage is defaulted to 1 for Windows 95 (it is defaulted to 0 for Win98 though) but I will add it nonetheless.

Ah, googled too now, found the same article. Then W95 won't start swapping before running out of physical RAM, and behaves like W98 with the parameter set by default. Guess the best you can do is to just add enough RAM for it to never, or at least seldom, run out 😀

I am using a CF card Sandisk Extreme 8gb. in my AMD 5x86-P75@133mhz. Works better than the WD 540mb IDE hard-drive I was using before.
I can scan the CF card for viruses using McAfee 5.1.3 and listen to music at the same time. Multitasking is much better using the CF card.
I don't know about swap file. I have my computer setup up in Server mode and page file I left as default.
Running Win95c works fine with 64mb ram.

Agree with the above statements regarding adding more RAM. The more physical RAM, the less swap file usage. After all, RAM is faster than using your storage as RAM 😀

What is the optimal setting for the page file in Win95c ?

Windows 95 Paging File

I'd not worry too much about wear and tear when using Compact Flash cards when using Windows 95. It should run fine with the standard configuration.

The <= FAT32 file systems are really basic as are the 95/98 operating systems and it's not until using NTFS and Windows XP that you start to see any performance degradation. Compact Flash cards were designed to frequently write large files and at very high speed, operations which are nothing compared to that within 95/98 or the overhead of running those operating systems.

I've been using SD and CF cards (using various IDE adaptors) with 3x and 9x without much issue, however advice to anyone starting out would be to try to get a card that is 4GB or less and is at least 20MB/s or above (133x or above). I've not encountered problems with any particular adaptor however I have run into some issues by using the older 40P ribbon and not the more up to date 80P ribbon. I have also seen female adaptors out there which plug directly into the IDE socket without the need of a ribbon.

As far as I know, CF card has on card controller which implements wear levelling as a standard, as per Wikipedia (Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on blocks by varying the physical location to which a block is written. This process is called wear leveling) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash That’s why it’s large compared with a tiny micro sd. SD card normally don’t have this controller chip, and relies on the adapter’s on-board chip to perform wearlevelling (if there’s any)... so I’d actually prefer a CF card except that it’s slow (33MB/s for dma33) but it acts like a modern ssd with ide interface... so no worry about swap files.

As much ram as you can have, then make a aditional ram drive, and put your swapfile there. Strange thing is, that a well equpped 16bit Windows 3.1x can run without a swapfile, but when you install Win32s or Windows 9x, there is no workaround from that dreaded swapfile, even if you have enough ram that you do not need it really. Linux has the same disease.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-02-02, 06:26:

As much ram as you can have, then make a aditional ram drive, and put your swapfile there. Strange thing is, that a well equpped 16bit Windows 3.1x can run without a swapfile, but when you install Win32s or Windows 9x, there is no workaround from that dreaded swapfile, even if you have enough ram that you do not need it really. Linux has the same disease.

Wat?

Linux needs a swap partition....

Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-02-02, 07:32:

Linux needs a swap partition....

No it does not.

Ok. I always had a some twisted memory that they did 😁

Yep, definitely doesn't need swap:

$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 32791824 7552132 380012 514748 24859680 24256032
Swap: 0 0 0

That was a really old thing, when memory was still measured in double or triple-digit megabytes (I still have some really old Slackware 1 or 2 install manuals that reccomend it). The old guideline was 1.5 times the amount of physical memory. But it was never actually a requirement.

If anything, Linux and OS/2 were always examplary of how well they managed memory with or without swap. But I digress..