I've got K-Meleon on a separate partition from my OS ( Win XP ). Is there any advantage to having the swap file on a separate partition from the OS?

To have programs and OS on different partitions is
a good idea. It also makes reinstalling easier,
if this should become necessary.
Having a swap partition is considered to be important in
Linux. Its purpose is being an enlargement of ram
in order to avoid system lockups, if ram should be
completely needed by an operation. This case may happen
more rarely nowadays, because of the available
size of ram in modern computers.
In Windows you have pagefile for swapping, but
a separate swap partition is also possible.
I do not know if this will speed up operations,
but I rather doubt it, at least in computers which
have a lot of ram available and need swapping in
few occasions only.
But may be some users of the forum have more experience
concerning a swap partition in Windows and can report.

Fred

Partitions have nothing to do with performance. What do are the hard disks.

You don't say how many hard disks do you have so I'll assume you have only one.

Ok, with this scenario you have, for example, 3 partitions, one for the XP, one for applications as K-meleon and another for the pagefile.sys (aka swap file).

This has "the same" performance as if you only have one partition. Why? Because you are already working with one hard disk and for each petition to read/write data, you have the same heads searching for the information and write them. Also, to access data all partitions within the same hard disk share the same bus, the same channel to transmit information and also other technical factors cause the access to the data to be, not slow, but busy, saturated in some way.

The best scenario is to have more than one Hard Disk and if they are on different channels (remember IDE disk can have 2 drives on each IDE) better.

For example, a good configuration could be as mine. Is not the best, of course, but is not bad.

I have 3 Hard Disks, each one with few partitions. On hard disk 1, I have the OSs, and the most common data (My documments, applications, you know) "spread" on different partitions; on the second hard disk I have the cache for browsers and other applications and other kind of data; on the third hard disk, I have more partitions, with data spread on them and the swap file pagefile.sys.

With this scenario, when you are using XP and K-meleon, when you are browsing, it is being read from the first hard disk when you open it, so then, this hard disk is without much use; than, the second hard disk, when you browse is used to manage cache, and store cached images, webs..., read them, etc; and the last hard disk, is used only if you have to swap any data from the memory if you haven't enough, but indeed, if you already have enough memory, the swap file is used, but that hard disk, as it not much used, gives you the speed to access information.

Long story short, what gives you performances is the speed to access information and if something is busy, say goodbye to performance.

Sorry for this long post.
Regards.

AFAIK it causes less "fragmentation" to have OS, programs and data on different partitions - You have defragment less often and it gives You a slight advantage since programs and OS are reading "ordered = less fragmented" files. That causes less activity on HDD.

p.s. & it causes less work during "repairs".
For the rest I am with JohnHell's assessment.

Yes, after that long post I forgot Thank you, guenter It's what I thought when I used quotes when I said it has the "same" performance one or various partitions.

@ JohnHell & guenter,

Thanks for the info.