I think that Digital's choice of defaults for this is very strange! I am
sysadmin for several AlphaStation 5/600 333Mhz. boxes at work, and it took
a while to discover the trick of removing /sbin/swapdefault (symlink to
the primary swap partition in /dev).
Actually, it's very easy to understand. Digital is first and foremost a
hardware company, and they want you to buy more memory. :-)
- Ted