# Paging file question...confused



## highlifer (Mar 21, 2007)

Hi, I'm having trouble finding out exactly how to set my paging file best optimized for gaming. My pc specs should be viewable by my name. Ok, I have my hard drive partitioned into two portions. The c: has my operating system on it and is 10gb in size. The setting for the page file right now on this drive is initial: 256, maximum: 3056. Now, here's where I get confused, initially when I first set this system up, my d: drive, which is the rest of my hd, had no paging file, I did not do this manually, I assume windows did. Recently I manually set it up to initial: 256, maximum: 3056. I have heard alot of people say to just turn paging file off completely but I would rather not. Are my settings ok for the amount of memory I have?


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## Tatty_One (Mar 21, 2007)

Welcome to the forums!

Firstly, the reason why your D drive has no paging file by windows default (and you are correct in assuming that) is that Windows XP only draws free space from the "first" drive (by default but you can change it), it does not/cannot (I beleive) draw from 2 places as once, hence in XP you get the option to choose the drive to have the page file on but not more than one.

Secondly, as you will probably be aware, all a paging file really is (in it's simplest terms) is a piece of your hard drive used to swop temporary data for programs and applications.  The problem with a page file is that the hard disk swapping involved when it is used is much slower than placing those temporary files into RAM which is much quicker, this is when you get the stuttering/lag with games and programs, most people for example when playing BF2 say that to run smoothy we need 2GB of RAM and they are right more or less and the sometimes slow load times and stuttering experienced whilst being due to insufficient RAM is that process of page filing on the hard drive.

Thirdly, where Windows is a bit naughty is that it thinks it's intelligent, so often it will use a page file even when you have plenty of RAM left in anticipation of more RAM usage through program activities, this of course slows the system down, by not having a page file windows is forced to use the faster RAM, It is common belief currently that if you have 2GB RAM under Windows XP Home there is no need for a paging file at all (not recommended for Vista or server/pro versions apparently).  I have read reviews that support this with some slight (and very slight they were!) performance increases.  

I have been running my system for 3 months with no paging file and didnt really see any difference TBH, so to keep a happy medium I set my minimum to 256MB and max to 512MB just to make sure there is a little spare capacity there if ever needed, if you put the max or minimum too high it will be used more frequently (bad!) and take longer to access (again bad!), that was clearly shown in the article I read but I cannot find it, it was from a few months ago.

So in conclusion (and sorry for the lengthy reply) I beleive that your page file is unneccearily big and with 2Gig of RAM you WILL NOT need it (and probably never use it all), if you want to have a page file IMO go for my 256/512MB option but of course the choice is yours!  I beleive in real world games having no Page file is likely to be the best performance options (only tho if you have a minimum of 2Gig RAM) however opinion can differ on this point.


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## Slater (Mar 21, 2007)

highlifer said:


> Hi, I'm having trouble finding out exactly how to set my paging file best optimized for gaming. My pc specs should be viewable by my name. Ok, I have my hard drive partitioned into two portions. The c: has my operating system on it and is 10gb in size. The setting for the page file right now on this drive is initial: 256, maximum: 3056. Now, here's where I get confused, initially when I first set this system up, my d: drive, which is the rest of my hd, had no paging file, I did not do this manually, I assume windows did. Recently I manually set it up to initial: 256, maximum: 3056. I have heard alot of people say to just turn paging file off completely but I would rather not. Are my settings ok for the amount of memory I have?


=( Alec would have loved this thread.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 21, 2007)

Slater said:


> =( Alec would have loved this thread.



VERY true!  Alec and I had a number of healthy but opposing discussions on various similar topics but it never got out of hand and TBH I kind of miss the guy.


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## highlifer (Mar 21, 2007)

Thank you very much Tatty-One, wow I did not expect so much info on the subject. I now have it set at c: initial:256, max:512 and no paging file for d:. Very interesting info and super speedy in the response !! Mucho appreciated.


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## DRDNA (Mar 21, 2007)

I am running XP pro 32 and I had a page file on two different arrays and had no problem or issues with it at all. It  really does work on XP and its an easy config! Is it worth it ? Well now that is debatable !


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## DRDNA (Mar 21, 2007)




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## HellasVagabond (Mar 22, 2007)

Windows CAN use every HDD the system has to place paging files on them however its quite useless.
The best things is to place a large ( 3gb ) paging file on the HDD you use the less when working or playing.
In my case i have my paging file at my backup HDD where i place my Backups ( obviously ) thus i aint using it that much.


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## hat (Mar 22, 2007)

You always want to keep your pagefile at a constant, ie 256 min 256 max, 1000 min 1000 max, etc


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## Tatty_One (Mar 22, 2007)

DRDNA said:


> I am running XP pro 32 and I had a page file on two different arrays and had no problem or issues with it at all. It  really does work on XP and its an easy config! Is it worth it ? Well now that is debatable !



Yes but as I said, that is Pro and therefore you have more options than with XP home.  With pro you should not disable Page filing as it will have an adverse effect.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 22, 2007)

HellasVagabond said:


> Windows CAN use every HDD the system has to place paging files on them however its quite useless.
> The best things is to place a large ( 3gb ) paging file on the HDD you use the less when working or playing.
> In my case i have my paging file at my backup HDD where i place my Backups ( obviously ) thus i aint using it that much.



In XP Home SP2 there is the option to determine which drive is used but not how many, well not on my copy of XP in anycase, if you have Pro or dual hardrives each with it's own operating system then you of course do have the option as Windows by default wants to have the page file on the drive it is installed on.

As I said, the downside to pagefiles is that it makes windows get lazy and tests do show that for a single boot system with 2GB or more of RAM it is not normally necessary, I have actually just gone back to disabling it but before I did I ran some benches and recorded my system settings, after a week I will run the same benches to see if there really is any performance differences.


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## W1zzard (Mar 22, 2007)

since nobody mentioned it .. having multiple pagefiles helps only if they are on different physical drives .. if you have multiple partitions on one drive make one swap file


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## tkpenalty (Mar 22, 2007)

I lowered the page file and it actually works better. Im laying off Zone Alarm for now though, since their latest patch really sucks (the reason why BF2142 was acting gay).


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## ex_reven (Mar 22, 2007)

does the page file usage affect other things non memory related?

say for example im running a program that starts using page file, would the use of pagefile slow down the read/write speed of the hard drive (or at least increase the amount of time required to run other applications on the computer) due to the hard drive skipping between reading/writing the programs data and using page file memory?

Or would the difference be negligible?


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## Tatty_One (Mar 22, 2007)

ex_reven said:


> does the page file usage affect other things non memory related?
> 
> say for example im running a program that starts using page file, would the use of pagefile slow down the read/write speed of the hard drive (or at least increase the amount of time required to run other applications on the computer) due to the hard drive skipping between reading/writing the programs data and using page file memory?
> 
> Or would the difference be negligible?



Yes it does but it's all memory related if you get my meaning, the point is that if you have 2GB+ of RAM, by disabling the pagefile you are forcing windows to use RAM which is of course much faster, Windows is lazy, well XP Home is lazy, for example with pagefiling enabled I can have task manager open whilst watching a DVD, it shows during that movie that I am using 120MB of the pagefile but it also shows that I have 840MB of RAM available! now if thats the case I am:
1.  Wasting my time buying 2GB of RAM.
2.  By having at least a large pagefile, encouraging my system to run slower.

As I said before, I am not really sure of how much (if any) performance difference there is but I will know soon when I run my benches and those will include video encoding etc etc.


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## Pinchy (Mar 22, 2007)

If you want me to run anything on Vista with the pagefile, ill be happy to do it for ya's


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## HellasVagabond (Mar 22, 2007)

I have Windows Xp Pro X64....
I disabled the pagefile ONCE in my life and the darn thing went beserk


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## Tatty_One (Mar 22, 2007)

HellasVagabond said:


> I have Windows Xp Pro X64....
> I disabled the pagefile ONCE in my life and the darn thing went beserk



lol, yes as I said, it should not be done on Pro or Vista versions of windows


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## highlifer (Mar 22, 2007)

After messing around with different page file settings my computer now needs to be booted twice upon restart. The first time, (and this has happened the last three times i rebooted) half-way through loading the desktop, it just freezes. No mouse movement, nothing. I'm forced to use the reset button on the front and then it works. What has happened? Any ideas?


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## highlifer (Mar 23, 2007)

Help please.


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## ktr (Mar 23, 2007)

what changes did you do?


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## highlifer (Mar 23, 2007)

ktr said:


> what changes did you do?



256/512 at first but got low on virtual memory warnings alot.
I then tried 512/1024 only to get the same warnings.
Now I dont know what to do.


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## Laurijan (Mar 23, 2007)

Hi!

Here is what I did:

I resized my pagefile to 512MB min 512MB max (I got 512Mb Ram)- This prevents the page file from getting fragmentet - its faster that way.
I have read that using a other partition on same HDD where Windows is does not help much it increseses the I/O activity of the HDD which makes the pagefile access slower - so if you have only 1 HDD just let the pagefile be there where Windows is.

Finetune the pagefile size with the help of "%SystemRoot%\system32\perfmon.msc /s" an administrative tool. There you can monitor the % and max usage of the pagefile. 
Let the monitor record and start a demanding game you play. Load to game comlpetly and play some minutes. If a message apears that the pagefile is to full. Quit the game and make it bigger in 50MB steps until the messeger doesn´t come anymore. The pagefile monitoring will show then how much PF you readly need - which it´s help increase/decrease the PF.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 23, 2007)

Laurijan said:


> Hi!
> 
> Here is what I did:
> 
> ...



For systems with 1GB or less RAM you should have a pagefile that is at least twice the size of your RAM therefore I do not beleive you have sufficient pagefile which will slow your system considerably, if you look at my earlier post, if you let it, windows will use the pagefile on occasions even with 2GB of RAM (even though it does not need to, it's just not that clever), so with 512MB of Pagefile on a 512MB system there will be slowdowns as windows must not only use the pagefile frequently but it must also clear it as it will fill at that size thus doubling the time it takes.

I say this because your theory is correct but windows XP Home is flawed, what it reports as usage and what it reports as required is false, hence my comment in an earlier post, the proof of the pudding is in the fact that with 2GB of RAM watching a DVD movie with task manager on it said it needed Pagefile virtual memory even though there was almost a Gig of RAM still available, it never used that sytem RAM and drew on the pagefile instead    By disabling the pagefile I ran the movie again and it used only 50MB more of system RAM than when there was a pagefile and the mathmatical differences between the 2 test just didnt add up if you get my meaning so I feel that Windows XP's management of the pagefile is crap and un-reliable but just my opinion.


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## aximbigfan (Mar 23, 2007)

personally, my page file is on a dedicated partion on a dedicated drive (maxtor 61.1gb 7200rpm drive) i set it as 4000mb as the inital and 4050 as the maximum... not that my system ever uses even a fraction of that...


chris


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## highlifer (Mar 23, 2007)

highlifer said:


> 256/512 at first but got low on virtual memory warnings alot.
> I then tried 512/1024 only to get the same warnings.
> Now I dont know what to do.




Please don't bury my plead for help, even after resetting to intitial:1024, max: 3056, I still have the freeze problem on reboot. This has never happened until messing with the page file.


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## ktr (Mar 23, 2007)

boot to safe mode, and do a system restore.


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## KennyT772 (Mar 23, 2007)

highlifer said:


> Please don't bury my plead for help, even after resetting to intitial:1024, max: 3056, I still have the freeze problem on reboot. This has never happened until messing with the page file.



If reseting your pagefile did not fix your problem, you probably have a corrupted file or some other windows error. As KTR said boot into safe mode and see if your computer still hangs. If it still does, do a system restore, or reinstall windows.


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## highlifer (Mar 23, 2007)

KennyT772 said:


> If reseting your pagefile did not fix your problem, you probably have a corrupted file or some other windows error. As KTR said boot into safe mode and see if your computer still hangs. If it still does, do a system restore, or reinstall windows.



Omfg, forgot about system restore !!!! Worked perfectly, thanks.
I just wish I could figure out this damn page file headache. Everyone has different opinions...seems like there should be something reasonable that works, like a happy medium everyone can agree on.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 23, 2007)

highlifer said:


> Omfg, forgot about system restore !!!! Worked perfectly, thanks.
> I just wish I could figure out this damn page file headache. Everyone has different opinions...seems like there should be something reasonable that works, like a happy medium everyone can agree on.



If you want to be safe and avoid problems set it to "windows manged pagefile" then you should not have any problems.


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## PuMA (Mar 23, 2007)

I must say that reducing pagefile to 256-512 did help the swapping issues with my system.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 23, 2007)

PuMA said:


> I must say that reducing pagefile to 256-512 did help the swapping issues with my system.


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## nana304 (Mar 24, 2007)

i would say set it 2560 min and max . no problems will occur. before that clear ur existing page file, do a reg clean, defrag drive C: 
it'll do.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 24, 2007)

nana304 said:


> i would say set it 2560 min and max . no problems will occur. before that clear ur existing page file, do a reg clean, defrag drive C:
> it'll do.



If you have your initial settings too high though, windows XP will use more pagefile on startup when it does not need to, thats if you have 2GB RAM though, does not really matter with 1GB or less.

I remain with no page file at all and things are running smoothly, I will do the benches tomorrow to copare performance with and without a pagefile.


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## highlifer (Mar 24, 2007)

Tatty_One said:


> If you have your initial settings too high though, windows XP will use more pagefile on startup when it does not need to, thats if you have 2GB RAM though, does not really matter with 1GB or less.
> 
> I remain with no page file at all and things are running smoothly, I will do the benches tomorrow to copare performance with and without a pagefile.




Please do.


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## nana304 (Mar 25, 2007)

for windows xp pagefile is essential ! no matter how much RAM u have.

*Never disable the PAGEFILE*   by doing that u r ruining all the hard work done by microsoft over the years to make xp completely and absolutely stable.
By doing that, you are spoiling win xp's working routine and forcing it to work in a way that its not ever intended to work, which is not so good. and it may create a lot of problems.


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## psychomage343 (Mar 25, 2007)

there is a lot to read here, but i believe if you simply edit the registry for the "disablepagingexectutive" or whatnot you can actually keep a decen pagefile say 1 or 2 gigs constant and force windows to only load system files to the ram, it's a pretty decent tweak, i noticed it ran slightly faster at startup, but started up slightly slower, i can wait an extra second in a 28 second boot lol


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## Tatty_One (Mar 25, 2007)

nana304 said:


> for windows xp pagefile is essential ! no matter how much RAM u have.
> 
> *Never disable the PAGEFILE*   by doing that u r ruining all the hard work done by microsoft over the years to make xp completely and absolutely stable.
> By doing that, you are spoiling win xp's working routine and forcing it to work in a way that its not ever intended to work, which is not so good. and it may create a lot of problems.



I am nit denying what you are saying but there are thousands of people out there with 2GB+ of Ram who have NEVER had a pagefile and most of them claim that their performace is better for it, just google, as for me, will be soon doing some testing to measure performance differences (if any) as I do not have a pagefile.

In anycase, as we are talking about "virtual" memory, then there is nothing to damage as you cannot damage software and if it was so dangerous as you beleive, why do you think windows gives you the option to disable it?


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## nana304 (Mar 25, 2007)

Yes may be there are a lot of them. but it dosent mean that and it has no rule think,  if a lot of people do it or likes it, we have to think that it is correct and its the best way.
they may have had sudden incovieniences which they may have ignored assuming something else may be,.

And i didnt mean it does any damge to any thing sotware or hadware , its about letting it work as it intended to work, its not like just disabling the indexing service as its virtually useless.

as i think windows has given the option to disable it , basicaly for troubleshooting purposes in case curroption issues etc.

if xp really benifits without pagefile with 2 gigs of ram or more, they would have let the world know about it  or made a hotfix or something to disable paging file when high memory space present/available in the system (eg 2 gigs or more.)
Then why dont they do that, they keep saying something different????

May be I'm wrong and you are correct, I wrote what i think is correct and most others will think lol

Is this going off topic ? anyway 
tnx


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## b1lk1 (Mar 25, 2007)

Let windows set the pagefile and you won't screw up your install again.  "Tweaking" windows does hardly anything except cause problems down the road.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 25, 2007)

nana304 said:


> if xp really benifits without pagefile with 2 gigs of ram or more, they would have let the world know about it  or made a hotfix or something to disable paging file when high memory space present/available in the system (eg 2 gigs or more.)
> Then why dont they do that, they keep saying something different????
> 
> May be I'm wrong and you are correct, I wrote what i think is correct and most others will think lol
> ...



They do, thats why Microsoft gives you the option to disable it, my point all along!  Windows is full of different options, the user chooses what is best for them, for critical processes you do not get an option......simple.

Step 6 in this guide does mention some anomolies with disabling.

http://www.sanx.org/tipShow.asp?index=181


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## nana304 (Mar 26, 2007)

_I do not mean the guide is totaly wrong or false positive ._  BUT, if u read it carefully;

on the "To tune the Windows pagefile:"  what they are saying is bullshit ! , it is totally incorrect. they are saying  "Greater than 512Mb: Click the No paging file radio button." 

its good for those who *only* use pcs for apps like office xp and those very low memory demanding applications and watching movies.

games these days do require a lot of ram, to run the system very smoothly while the game uses most of ur ram ,you need paging file. 

secondly they say in "Note:" 

"Some programs, games in particular, seem to require a pagefile to run. Abode Photoshop 7.0 moans about there not being a pagefile, but operates without issue afterwards. *If you get errors following this step, put the pagefile back, but set it to equal the amount of RAM installed."* again why do we create errors ourselvs?

Now here what they say is to put the pagefile back, but set it to equal the amount of RAM installed. This is correct for those who have atleast 1.5 gb ram. But for peolple having low ram eg 512, 1.024 ram,  its not the correct again. 
Talking about errors , 'If you get errors ..........'  Have to state some errors are visible , and some are not. and when we have error reporting service and logs disabled ,  dont see any errors coming through and we tend to think 'My system is running very smoothly" 

again what i say is there is no rule to believe anything coz a lot of other people say or do so.
 at last, too much "Tweaking" windows can lead to a lot of troubles.

I think this is really giong off topic ... 

tnx


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## nana304 (Mar 26, 2007)

.


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## Mussels (Mar 26, 2007)

Tatty_One said:


> Welcome to the forums!
> 
> lots of stuff was here



i havent read this entire thread, but you do have mistakes that i feel i must correct.

Windows XP does not use the page file automatically on multiple drives, cause hello, its designed to work on one alone. Also, how would things work if flash drives, external hard drives, DVD-RAM drives etc all magically got page files on them, just because they had a lucky letter? it wouldnt play well if you disconnected one suddenly...

and yes, you can have upto 4 drives with swap files on them. there is no limit for just one.
You are best off throwing it onto your least used drive - windows WILL be faster if you have it on a different drive, since they wont be both accessing files at the same time.

Min/max is BS - you get fragmentation. set it to 512/512 or 1024/1024 and you'll have a static file that never needs enlarging or shrinking.

"if you put the max or minimum too high it will be used more frequently (bad!)" -not true. some apps (photoshop) use page file no matter what - all you're doing is ensuring it has to swap in and out of ram several times instead of just the once.

"with 2Gig of RAM you WILL NOT need it"
- sure, unless he runs photoshop or CAD or a game thats designed ot use it, in which case he will get hangs and crashes.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 26, 2007)

Mussels said:


> i havent read this entire thread, but you do have mistakes that i feel i must correct.
> 
> Windows XP does not use the page file automatically on multiple drives, cause hello, its designed to work on one alone. Also, how would things work if flash drives, external hard drives, DVD-RAM drives etc all magically got page files on them, just because they had a lucky letter? it wouldnt play well if you disconnected one suddenly...
> 
> ...



Did I say it uses a pagefile on multiple drives?  If I did, please show me as I did not mean to say that if your post was aimed at me.  I actually think I stated "you have the option to choose which one BUT NOT MORE THAN ONE" Unless you have dual boot etc etc.

OK, I am running Adobe photoshop and BF 2142/Oblivion/Fear etc, all run fast and smoothly.......I have the pagefile disabled, how do you explain that in regard to your theory above?  Theory is great, I think I also mentioned in an earlier post something like "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" as in ....whats best for some may not be best for others.

And my one other point, accessing the hard drive is slower than accessing RAM so how can accessing a pagefile when you still have a Gig of ram unused be quicker?  Again you only need to open task manager and see how much an app is drawing off the pagefile and how much ram is unused.

Now as I have said, the origional question posed was about the function of the pagefile, you will see that I never advised anyone to disable it specifically though many do, I simply highlighted various options giving examples of the outcome in my specific experience, one person changed his pagefile size and said it seemed to improve things I beleive, that is not theory but practice! I prefer in my posts not to tell people what is best as we all have our own opinions, rather inform them what their options are so they may make an informed decision, that way it avoids flamewars and arguments.

The other 2 points I raised in that first post of mine......did you read it all? was, that it was commonly beleived that with 2Gig of ram a pagefile was un-necessary, I did not say I beleived it, it is commonly beleived rightly or wrongly, you only need to google and secondly I said that I thought his pagefile was too big with his amount of RAM as he had over 3Gig of pagefile, 3 times the size of the example you stated above!


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## Tatty_One (Mar 26, 2007)

nana304 said:


> _I do not mean the guide is totaly wrong or false positive ._  BUT, if u read it carefully;
> 
> on the "To tune the Windows pagefile:"  what they are saying is bullshit ! , it is totally incorrect. they are saying  "Greater than 512Mb: Click the No paging file radio button."
> 
> ...



I agree which as I said above is why I would not advise someone to specifically do it, just give them the options but as I said before, as you know I am trying it without the pagefile at the moment and things currently are as smooth as silk, maybe that will change!


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## steelkane (Mar 28, 2007)

I have 2Gb of Rambus and set my min & max at the same. I set all my pc that way and never had a problem.


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## D007 (Mar 28, 2007)

I run 2 gb ram.. im going to run some tests. I'd like to see if this can increase my performance. cool, something to do after I oc..lol.. I always keep my paging min and max the same but thats all i do.. my file size is likely very large but i think im going to reduce it after reading here to 1024 or 512.. i guess, see what it does..

Revised: Ran 3-d mark 06 with 2 x 1 gb A-data memory.. set my virtual mem file size to 1024 / 1024..
 i didnt see any issues.. still looking into it.. im going to max it and drop it to 0 and test it both ways. but i know on previous occasions dropping my page file size to 0 has errored me out of several programs and forced me to up my V mem. but that was on a much weaker pc.. idk what it will do with 2 gb yet.. will see..


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## Mussels (Mar 29, 2007)

Tatty_One said:


> Did I say it uses a pagefile on multiple drives?  If I did, please show me as I did not mean to say that if your post was aimed at me.  I actually think I stated "you have the option to choose which one BUT NOT MORE THAN ONE" Unless you have dual boot etc etc.



sure, but not more than one - you can use four. you can certainly use more than one.



Tatty_One said:


> OK, I am running Adobe photoshop and BF 2142/Oblivion/Fear etc, all run fast and smoothly.......I have the pagefile disabled, how do you explain that in regard to your theory above?  Theory is great, I think I also mentioned in an earlier post something like "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" as in ....whats best for some may not be best for others.



Because you havent ran out of ram yet - when it happens, you will crash the app/system.



Tatty_One said:


> And my one other point, accessing the hard drive is slower than accessing RAM so how can accessing a pagefile when you still have a Gig of ram unused be quicker?  Again you only need to open task manager and see how much an app is drawing off the pagefile and how much ram is unused.


How about... DLL files, game installers, etc - they get swapped to the hard drive, LEAVING the ram free for apps that need it. they get put the the page file if they havent been used in a while, thats why they use it.



Tatty_One said:


> Now as I have said, the origional question posed was about the function of the pagefile, you will see that I never advised anyone to disable it specifically though many do, I simply highlighted various options giving examples of the outcome in my specific experience, one person changed his pagefile size and said it seemed to improve things I beleive, that is not theory but practice! I prefer in my posts not to tell people what is best as we all have our own opinions, rather inform them what their options are so they may make an informed decision, that way it avoids flamewars and arguments.


and your practice results in issues for a lot of people. this is why i disupted it.




Tatty_One said:


> The other 2 points I raised in that first post of mine......did you read it all? was, that it was commonly beleived that with 2Gig of ram a pagefile was un-necessary, I did not say I beleived it, it is commonly beleived rightly or wrongly, you only need to google and secondly I said that I thought his pagefile was too big with his amount of RAM as he had over 3Gig of pagefile, 3 times the size of the example you stated above!



- i'm quoting and commenting on specific points of your posts. If i was going to comment on your first post that you mention, i would have.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 29, 2007)

I think we are going around in circles here, to say that I have not run out of RAM yet is why my system is running smoothly is precisly the point why some people say (not me) that you dont need a pagefile when you have a certain amount of RAM, After your comment in the previous post, I ran photoshop, did some editiing and uploading, at the same time I ran a DVD movie whilst running Sciencemark "!!!!! if it dont crash then.....please tell me when it's likely too, you may be forgetting that when RAM fills it swops, ie.....out with the old, in with the new but I appreciate thats only when it can if it does not need it anymore.

You said:

"How about... DLL files, game installers, etc - they get swapped to the hard drive, LEAVING the ram free for apps that need it. they get put the the page file if they havent been used in a while, thats why they use it".........not disputing this fact but if thats the case why do many people report that disabling the pagefile increases game performance?  As my origional post said, just because its the way windows likes to do things does not mean to say it's the best way!  We could all agree in one form or another that windows isnt always the best at managing itself which is why many people "tweak" certain things within the OS.

And:

"and your practice results in issues for a lot of people. this is why i disupted it"........what exactly is my practice?  I have said 3 times now, I was not suggesting and have not suggested that anyone disable the pagefile, again I will say so it's clear.........I meerly stated the options, I have only disabled my pagefiles since this thread was started to test if there are any problems so how can you dispute advice that I have NOT given?
Do you not feel that people should be aware of all the options as opposed to me just telling them what I think is best?


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## INSTG8R (Mar 29, 2007)

I always run a static pagefile whether it gets used or not (1536 I believe)


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## Tatty_One (Mar 29, 2007)

I am just about to run Sceincemark 2, PC Mark 2005 and 3Dmark 2006 to see how the benches compare, I ran the tests 10 days ago with the page file enabled and set at a min/max of 1024MB, I recorded all my key system settings, I will now do the same without the pagefile and see if there is any difference, will keep you posted.


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## D007 (Apr 3, 2007)

I have been looking into this as well.. the only way to truly turn off your paging file is to do it in regedit.. which i think is unnecessary anyway.. I have tested the hell out of this paging file thing myself and have come across no conclusive evidence that it loads or processes anything faster.. if there are any difference they are so miniscule as to not even be worth paying attention to.. Just make sure your minimun and maximum paging file sizes are the same so windows doesn't have to ever try to adjust the size of the paging file.. that is one main reason paging files run as slow as they do as well. set it to something nominal, (adverage) and let it be.. it'll be fine.


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