XP using 600MB of my 100MB Pagefile???

So I open up task manager to see that windows is using ~580MB of my pagefile. Then I go to the Performance Options window (where you can manage the size of the PF) to see that the "Total paging file size for all drives" is 100MB! How is this possible?

As I understand it that number includes your ram.

Yes, that is a combination of Physical and actual PF.

That's a pretty small pagefile... Might want to up that some, unless you are really running on a tiny hard drive.

Yeah, why such a small pagefile? You have plenty of space according to your signature.

cause I want to force windows to use as much of my RAM as possible. Plus I have it set to range from 100MB - 2GB as needed, but it currently says it only has 100MB.

cause I want to force windows to use as much of my RAM as possible.

Click to expand...

Setting a very small initial pagefile size does nothing to accomplish this and when it does need to use more then 100MB of the pagefile your wasting resources by making Windows resize it. The best option is setting a high initial size (e.g. 4x your maximum observed usage through perfmon) and set the max about twice that. That should be large enough to where Windows never needs to resize it, but just in case a "safety net" is there.

I'm glad to see you don't disable the pagefile to force Windows to use more of your RAM though. (which would actually result in MORE paging in other areas to compensate for no pagefile)