I currently have two Hard discs on the same IDE channel thingy. One's 120GB, which I use for my current OS. On the Slave, I have a 40GB harddisc, which i don't really use at all.

It seems logical to me to move the Swap over to the 40GB one, especially as my Computer seems to have gotten very slow recently (would buy new RAM, but i'm looking for a cheapass solution here ). Are there any disadvantages to that?

AdAware
Spybot Search & Destroy
A decent, up to date AntiVirus program
Uninstall unused or unwanted programs
Perform Disk Cleanup
Defrag


Then see if your Computer still seems to be as slow as it's 'gotten recently'.

You might even decide to pull that second, unused drive out of it!

Seriously, unless all that stuff has been attended to first, it's not worth considering moving functions.

done all of them. No effect. And I need that second harddrive for when i want to test MS Longhorn.

Think about what IDE is...and the max transfer rate for it. Then think of what you're saying. Wouldn't it be better to keep it on the same drive? I had exp. with this before and I put my swap space for archlinux .5 on a 200MB drive and my main OS was on a 1GB drive. The 200MB drive died...so did my install of archlinux. That's a disadvantage as well...but if you're game for it, there isn't anything saying you cant do it. Does it make things better? No. Does it make them worse? No. Your choice.

Actually, it does seem to have made a significant improvement - before when I played Rise of Nations over the net, it was very jittery, subject to constant freezes of varying length, most eventually threw me out of the game. However, I've just played it after donating a 3GB partition on my second drive to the swap (and removing the swap on my primary partition), and there were only a couple of freezes and none of any significant length at all.
But perhaps it was just a conincidence. I'll inform you of how this turns out in the long run sometime.

How much RAM and how much swap are you talking about here?

a terrible 256MB ram and now 3GB swap.

But before you all gut me for having a huge and probably mostly empty swap (), I've decided that a format and reinstall is probably the best solution anyway.

Actually there are multiple advantages. Consider this: putting the swap on a separate physical hard drive means that the program/data file system and virtual-memory filesystem are kept apart, for the most part. Especially with 256 MB or less, this reduces "thrashing"--excess head movement caused by system contention for the same physical drive. Not only that, it keeps the program/data and virtual-memory queues separated, as well--all of which can lead to improved overall system performance.

The biggest benefit of all, however, is to be gained from setting minimum and maximum sizes for the swap file to the same value, thus eliminating fragmentation.

Another consideration is that if the second drive is a slower one than the main system drive, performance improvements will be offset by the slower drive performance.

it's better on a seperate disk on a seperate channel, but virt mem isn't brilliant, you probably want ot get some more ram if you are Regularly using up large amounts of virt mem :/