WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL USES THE PAGING FILE TO TEMPORARILY STOREDATA FROM THE COMPUTER’S MEMORY

1.

Correct Answers: C

A. Incorrect:

Windows XP Professional uses the paging file to temporarily store

data from the computer’s memory. Decreasing the size of the paging file increases

the free space on the system’s hard disk, but it does not improve the system’s per-

formance.

B. Incorrect:

NTFS allows files and directories to be compressed at the file system

level. This allows compressible files to consume less space on the hard disk.

Although compressing files increases the free space on the hard disk, it does not

improve the system’s performance.

C. Correct:

Hard disks perform best when file data is written in contiguous blocks.

Over time, however, file data can become broken into discontiguous fragments.

Although the hard disk is still able to access fragmented files, they take longer to

load. Because the user’s performance problem was most noticeable when access-

ing files, and no maintenance had been done in at least a year, the cause of the

problem is most likely disk fragmentation. Running the Disk Defragmenter utility

resolves this problem and drastically improves disk performance on affected sys-

tems.

D. Incorrect:

The Performance Logs and Alerts service is used when logging data

for performance analysis. Although it is necessary for logging performance data,

simply starting the service does not improve system performance.