hi... i was advised by a m8 that since i have 1gig on DDR memory there is no need for me to have a page file, and winxp wld work better without one... is this true ? i have jus set my PC to no page file, is this the best idea ? thx AMD XP 2800+ @ 2.4ghz DDR PC2700 2x512MB 360gig (4drives) erm cant think anyting else u'd need to know for this question ltr
The page file is like a note pad for Windows on the HDD where it scribbles away all the data and stuff it needs to keep in working memory, but for which no physical RAM is available. In theory, it is better for Windows to keep it all in RAM, if the space is available. This is because RAM is faster than any HDD, and also Windows doesn't have to waste time managing the swap file size (space allocation on HDD). In practice, you may get unstuck on some memory (read: graphics) intensive programmes which really like a chunk of swap file (Photoshop, anyone? ). So you may be best switching it back on. Windows will hog all the RAM you got available before it resorts to the page file anyway. To speed things up, you could freeze the swap file size so Windows doesn't waste time resizing it, but gains will be minimal. And no, don't start thinking of RAM disks... They were designed for (very) early versions of Windows which didn't handle RAM exceeding 64 Mb. Sort of no point to that now really, given that RAM disks only take up physical RAM that Windows could have used conventionally so that it didn't need a RAM disk in the fist place...
Short answer, no... This isn't really a good idea since some applications need a swap file and won't work without one. Best thing to do is keep it at a set size, that way if it's needed it is there and being a set size it wont get as fragmented.
I keep mine at 300meg, although it rarely goes over 150 with a gig of memory. If you have another harddisk, it can make it faster to keep the pagefile off the OS disk. Itll also not fragment as much but you wont really get fragmentation if its a set size anyway.
with 512m pc2700, i find that just keeping my page file at 768 is fine ... it never really startes thrashing unless i try to open a badly made pdf ...
I got mine on it's own partition at the beginning of a second disk. Not sure how much is used, though I did monitor it when I first set it up I ended up setting it at 2gig as I had the disk space to spare...
