Setting up a permanent swapfile under Windows 3.0

So while I was playing around with the idea of a Windows 3.0 powered (lol) BBS I ran into one weird thing with it swapping like crazy, and eventually depleting all my disk space!

Well when I actually used Windows 3.0 back in the day, I had a 286 so I never got to play with virtual memory.  By the time I got a 386, I was using Windows 3.11 & OS/2 which in Windows you configure it with the 386 icon in the control panel.  On OS/2 it’s a line in the config.sys.

But for Windows 3.0 it’s a standalone program, swapfile.exe.  And the best part is that you cannot run it in 386 Enhanced mode, nor in standard (286) mode.  You have to first start Windows in realmode.

So now I could force it to swap on a secondary drive, or more importantly contain it’s filegrowth so it doesn’t take up the entire disk.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.