Will an older IDE PATA hard disk be better for my Windows swap disks than my faster SATA Boot drive?

SATA drive would definitely be faster, but for the best results you should give the swap file its own home on a separate drive, not the boot drive. If it's an option, you could experiment with using a SSD (solid state drive), as this unlike a typical electromechanical hard drive has no moving parts and offers significantly faster speeds than the best hard drives out there. Don't use a USB flash drive, however, for this purpose (see pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/30pog... which talks about the limited life span of flash devices, making them unsuitable for activities such as swap file maintenance which involves rapid and frequent disk access).

I don't know how much noticeable difference it would make, but in your situation, I would try the swap on the PATA and just use the SATA for the Adobe scratch. It works fine that way, and it is pretty painless to change it back if you don't like the results.

With your setup you will likely get the highest performance boost by repartitioning your existing drive so that it has only one partition. Using multiple partitions will slow disk performance. With only one partition the most frequently used files will be closer and will enable Windows to more efficiently use the disk.

If you can also trying turning on PAE mode (if your hardware supports it) so that Vista can use all 4GB of your memory. You could also try using ReadyBoost.

If you're using a lot of swap, then the fastest drive you have will be best suited to being the swap.. I would recommend grabbing a cheap SATAII drive to use as your swap where possible, however there is no substitute for RAM. If it's possible to use 64bit Vista, this will allow you to utilise your RAM, and maybe install more. Having said all that, it's worth throwing that PATA drive in and just testing it out.. run some tests using your main HDD and then run the same tests using your PATA drive - say a complicated process in Photoshop.

Time with a stopwatch.

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