File Allocation Cache

[tedthebear]

Can somebody explain why this tweak is good for a 19 gb hard drive?

Disk fragmentation occurs inherently in Windows 9x and most frequently accessed files "break up" spanning across non-sequential clusters, especially over long periods of time.

But you can limit fragmentation by increasing the free cluster size Windows 9x looks for when storing files on disk, thus decreasing the time the System Agent (Task Scheduler) "Low disk notification" and "Maintenance disk cleanup" and the Maintenance Wizard tools take for tuning up your system, by forcing Windows to ignore larger amounts of fragmented disk space, and to avoid splitting larger files the same time.

If you have any newer monster multi-GigaByte size hard disk(s), you may want to set this value to "high": 2048 - 4096.

If you don't work frequently with multi-MegaByte size files, you may want to set it to "low": 512 - 2048.

Will this tweak actually improve my system performance much????
Thanks.

[reboot]

Nope.
Set your swapfile to a fixed number (monitor it for awhile, then set it about 100k bigger than the largest it's ever been), then defrag once a week or so.
You can also improve performance if you have a decent amount of RAM, say...128meg or more, by adding this line to the [386enh] section of system.ini: ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1