i only suggest this to users with at least a 512MB USB drive(although it will work for a 256MB if you half the numbers)
What you need:>
1 usb drive (512MB or more)
one bootable puppy CD, or a linux OS otherwise
a partion tool, in this case Gparted
some basic understanding of partitioning
What are you doing?
You are creating a small linux swap partition on your usb drive.
Why are you doing it?
To pick up laggy performance, and avoid having to do the same thing on your hardrive.
Warning: This does cause the usb drive to be used for writes as needed, this does mean that your stick will not reap ALL the benefits of puppys write rarely to extend the life of the usb. The other side of the coin is that it WILL help extend the life of your internal memory. if you feel like not using the swap all the time such as only when you want to use art programs for animation for instance, simply open mut and turn of the swap! and turn it on as needed.
(i personally am comfortable leaving it on.)Steps:
1. boot from your puppy bootable cd, or run your linux distro of choice containing the partition tool(gparted for this solution)
2. once you have reached the desktop, insert your usb stick
3. start Gparted from Menu-->system menu
4. You should see a default view containing the Hard drive and its partitions, Ignore it
5. at the top left of the Gparted screen click Gparted then devices from the sub menu and now look for a entry which looks size wise to be your usb drive and select it.(most of the time it will be a sda, sdb, or something close to that)
6. you should now see a bar graph and below that a table containing the existing partition. It will be a FAT16 or FAT32.(if it already has puppy installed and other files that is fine! If not thats is ok too.)
7. select the partition from the list and select resize from the buttons located above the visual graph. you will now see a box with 3 entry fields. Free space preceeding, new size, and free space following.
We will be editing FREE SPACE FOLLOWING only.
8. In the free space field we will enter a value of either:
32 or 64 if you are using a 256MB stick
64 or 96 if you are using a 512 MB stick.
128 or 192 if you are using a 1GIG stick or greater.
The "free space following" entry is going to be the same space/size we will use to create our new swap partition. This space will essentially become ram as needed. if you are not quite sure what number to use, 64 is a good default for now if your using a 512MB or 256MB stick, and i like 192MB for GIG and larger sticks as it makes downloading and editing files better if you dont want to reboot often.(you can always make it smaller if you ever want the space) Once you have made a decision click RESIZE.(*note*- if your fat partition is very full and you want the larger performance, you may need to delete your pupsave file and start anew. this means backup your stuff to another medium if its important!)
9.Now RIGHT CLICK the new unallocated space that we have created in the menu and select new. we are only going to be concerned with the right hand bottom drop down option called Filesystem. It is preset to ext2. We will change this to linux-swap, then click the add button.
10. Finally we will look at the visual bar graphs to verify that we will now have 2 partitions, one is the smaller fat file system, the other is the new linux swap. If they look ok, we will select edit from the top of the screen and then click APPLY.
Thats it! you have now created a new partition on your usb drive to fulfill all your ram hogging needs! Eject the puppy disk, leave the usb stick in the usb port, reboot, and see if you are happier with your newly trained puppy!
