hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 might want to take that up with the people who wrote the SDK documentation then because they have it in there ;) You'll have to provide a reference to that, or at the very least explain how on earth it is going to create a new file when the file system driver is no longer running. The "page file" is simply used for crash dumps because it represents a set of disk sectors that can be safely written to without compromising data integrity. Windows writes directly to these sectors using the disk driver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 I'm sure that if you disable the PageFile it cannot come back by itself Unless we are now speaking of (unrelated) caching Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 The why does a system run faster without it? It doesn't? I've tried and been unable to measure any difference. I've also watched the page fault statistics, and it virtually never pages to disk anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Wait I'm sure it does This is just by looking at a 512Meg Ram computer without Pagefile Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Only 512MB? I guess that could be a marginal case where it has to resort to using less memory because there is no page file available, whereas earlier it would just page to disk when you used too much? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Yes that's it. "Resort to using less memory" Because without the PageFile, it will not be used. And only Ram will be used Because if PageFile exists, then it will use some of the PageFile, even before Ram is maxed out Therefore zero PageFile can speed up a system :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 If you're bordering right at the edge of the available memory, then chances are you will want to have paging so programs won't just run out of memory and/or crash though? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Quote 50Meg ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hell-In-A-Handbasket Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 never disable it if anything put a small fast HDD as a secondary drive and put the pagefile on that if your worried Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 I agree I'm presently running 2Gig of Ram on XP With 1.5Gig PageFile on my secondary drive Oh but make sure the secondary drive (not partition of course) is a fast (generally standard) drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M_Lyons10 Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 This is an interesting thread. For me personally, I've never disabled the pagefile, but I don't really understand how disabling it could improve performance personally... I don't really understand the argument. It sounds to me like a PC Gamer that thinks they're a PC Expert trying to sound knowledgeable... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 I'm only going by experience And its common knowledge that zero pagefile will make your system faster (well I thought it was) And I've had long debates on PageFile before And even though I have thousands of games, I'm not really a "gamer" anymore I do believe I know a bit about computers and Windows though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicholas P. Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 If you use your system for just running one application at the time, Just playing a game and then off it won't make any difference. However disabling the pagefile will not speed up your computer by any chance. I wonder why users speak about speeding up whilst I believe they are based only on these rubish theories without able to prove of what they are saying. Ask yourself why even linux need a swap partition. Pagefile has nothing to do with memory and speeding up. Moreover there is a very crucial temp space needed by the OS for applications, file transfers etc. Disabling the pagefile will cause applications to crash (not as often as it may sound) and generally will leed to poor performance especially during heavy multitasking. linux swap and windows pagefile can be calculated by the size of the ram. The more ram u have the more pagefile and swap u need for crucial OS needs. There is an easy way and a hard way to determine the size of the pagefile you need. Following the link below you will get an idea. MS Support - Determine pagefile size However because windows don't use a seperate partition you might need to optimize that space on your own. Just follow some simple steps. 1. Disable the pagefile 2. Reboot your system 3. Defrag your disk which will hold your pagefile (for 1 physical drive its pointless to keep the pagefile elsewhere. Keep the default path) On vista i would suggest you to use the system defrag tool. Any OS before Vista i would suggest OO defrag. 4. Determine the pagefile size and create a static pagefile 5. And Thats it. The pagefile will remain in good shape from now on. Regards, Nikos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 You may have missed the separate Hard Drive better choice option And by the way, anyone got an XP with 512Meg? Disable the PageFile (for a test) and watch it fly ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Treemonkeys Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Just disable it and try it out, it's not going to hurt anything. At worst you'll get an out of memory error and have to re-enable it. (oh noes) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Veteran Posted August 14, 2009 Veteran Share Posted August 14, 2009 Good god people. Its really simple. Leave windows to auto manage it, as it will use it when needed. Leave it on. </thread> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 It will "use it" even if Ram is not maxed out remember Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yxz Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 It will "use it" even if Ram is not maxed out remember +1 windows 7 "pages" even when there is free memory Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimsland Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Thanks for someone knowing But please change Windows 7 to Windows all Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilike2burnthing Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 after using every version of Windows ever released and providing support to all of them I know this off topic, but I just highly doubt the validity of this statement, though I could be wrong, you could have installed and provided support to Windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98(+SE), ME, XP, Vista and 7, not to mention all the SP's and variants. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 +1windows 7 "pages" even when there is free memory Extremely rarely. Have you had the performance monitor open and looked? It's completely insignificant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soldier1st Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 what your friend said was just bull as windows will still use it even if it gets turned off as all your doing is turning off your ability to manage it and as long as you got enough memory i would leave it alone, perhaps in the earlier days it would make a difference but we aint there now. i always leave mine alone but i used to fiddle with it at one time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MagicAndre1981 Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 don't disable it. You need it when you have a BSOD, so that Windows can write the dump information first into the page file and on reboot into the real dump file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+allan MVC Posted August 14, 2009 MVC Share Posted August 14, 2009 There are clearly some people in this thread who want you to think they know what they are talking about when they don't. Here's the bottom line - do whatever you like. It's your system. Turn the pagefile off (it's not really off, but if you think it is that's fine) or leave it on. Set it large or set it small. Whatever makes you happy. These pagefile threads are nonsense. Do whatever you think works best for you. Next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdood Posted August 14, 2009 Share Posted August 14, 2009 Turn the pagefile off (it's not really off, but if you think it is that's fine) Of course it is. Why on earth do you believe Windows creates super secret page files on your hard drive even though you've explicitly instructed it not to? What do you base this absurd claim on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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