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I dont want a pagefile!

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Foxie3a

Normal Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2003
What is the difference betwen a page file, virtual memory, and a swap file?

I disabled my virtual memory, didn't see a change in performance. I have 1gb of RAM. When hitting control alt delete I see that I'm using 230mb of a page file. I have about 650mb of RAM free though. I want to eliminate using my hard drives all together, and only use my RAM. Do you have any idea how expensive 1gb of Corsair XMS-2 Pro is? If I'm paying that much, I want to use my wimpy 4gb/s mem bandwith and not my raptor's 45mb/s bandwith.

How can I do this? Thanks. :)
 
I don't think you could disable the pagefile, the best thing was to put it on a drive seperate of the os. That's what I do.
 
A pagefile and a swapfile is the same thing. Virtual memory is what a swapfile enables

Of course you can disable the swapfile under control panel - system - advanced - performance settings
 
you may be able to disable it, but its still there. Do a search for this, I believe Jigpu fought with it a while back.
 
The minimum for Windows XP is 2MB, and if you set it to something less then 128MB your system may get a tad slower after awhile.
 
I have disabled it in the place specific, under the system tab somewhere. I have rebooted. It shows a 300mb page file. Why?
 
It's really wierd I know I've been battling it myself for a while.Also Even though I had 1.25gigs in my pc last week windows was saying I was running low on resources :rolleyes:
I think it just needs it to work properly.I set mine to 512 min and max and I'm done with it now.
 
Virtual memory is using the hdd instead of ram. Windows 98 and lower called it a swapfile, not sure about ME, but 2000/xp calls it a pagefile. Only the name of the 'virtual memory' and the name of the file itself changed.

I also have 1gb of ram, and I have found it best to set the minimum and maximum settings to 128mb. If I go lower, like say setting both to zero, it does work, but this very annoying pop-up always alerts me that there is very low virtual memory, and I should do something about it before my systems blows up!...Not really that last part, but windows just overeacts too much, and needs to learn to shutup imo.

If you set both the min and max for the 'page file' to the same number, then windows won't change it, this also helps to keep the hdd unfragmented, sometimes. but if I set mine to less than 128 windows whines, w/ this really shrill pop-up everytime it boots, so I just make do with 128 mb less hdd space, since I really hate whiny software.
 
If you have a large amount of RAM, eg. 1GB+, a 512MB pagefaile may be enough. make sure to set the 'DisablePagineExecutive' in the registry, it will make the system faster with larger amounts of RAM. For 512 - 1GB RAM: 1GB pagefile.
 
right click mycomputer, hit properties --> advanced --> performance options --> advanced --> Vertual memory, Change --> Check the radio button for no page file.

I really dont recomend that you do this as MS optimizes windows for page file useage, they anticipated that the average computer would have 256mb of memory and would require the HD for sawping. You will likly have a performance hit, even with 1+gb of memory.
 
I had windows 2000 running on P3 duallies for a while with 2GB of RAM and even with that much memory it didn't seem to like it (programmes kept saying that there was insufficient memory even when not much was running). I just let the system manage the size.
 
Can a page file be too large? I have placed a page file of 2414MB on an old 5400 rpm drive, the only thing on the drive. Windows XP SP2 recommends 766MB. What do you gurus say?
 
grunid said:
Can a page file be too large? I have placed a page file of 2414MB on an old 5400 rpm drive, the only thing on the drive. Windows XP SP2 recommends 766MB. What do you gurus say?

Hm not sure but i'd say bigger is better. It may get fragmented though, causing it to slow down.
 
Virtual Memory=Virtual Paging
Page File=Virtual Memory File
Swap File=Page File
 
kinda a waste of RAM imo, most of the XP stuff on the pagefile just sits there...and isn't swapped back and forth very often, if at all...(most of it 200-400mb)
 
After getting 1GB of RAM.I killed my pagefile in XP PRO and things have run great. It was a bit of a pain to get rid of it though. Freed up 1.5GB on my HD.
 
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