Have a go at moving your Windows paging file

I just moved my Windows paging file to a another drive (albeit a partition) and my machine is noticably faster - even the internet is faster - not download speed-wise, just the way pages fill up on the screen.

I always used to clear my page file when turning off the machine, so it could not be due to clutter - just moving it away from the Windows partition has made a very noticeable speed increase.

I'd always heard about moving the page file, but had never tried it until I had been getting hard-drive problems.

So far, it is running fine - well, better than before and the process to move the page file is dead easy for anyone with more than one partition or drive.


The reason why I did this was I was having a few hard disk problems recently - the hard disk was clicking and making funny sort of arcade-type noises - beepy/boopy sort of noises. My system kept freezing for a while, then unfreezing, then freezing again. The problem didn't have any pattern to it. I couldn't find any faults on the hard-drive and it wasn't caused by any particular access that I could determine.

Move it to another, physical drive.

Even better, move it to a primary partition at the start of a faster, different, physical drive. Notice the difference now ;)



You have an R2D2 failure on your hands :P

Best prepare some backups buddy.

After added another Gig of Mem stick and minimizing the paging file use, my Windows gets really much faster.

Ah, I have 1.5GB of RAM, yet when I moved the Page File, Windows wanted me to increase the size of it from when it was on C:.

I might play around with different sizes - may Google about for info on this, coz I have the Max size set to the Max possible value of 4096 MB - which is pretty chuffing huge.

I've got a 2GB fixed pagefile on the first partition (also 2GB) on my HD. Windows is installed in E:

Don't ask.

Wow, so you're saying that Windows almost runs normally when it's got 4GB of RAM? (theoretically speaking)
Large it up Bl0atwar3 cR3w!

been there done that.

I have 6gb of virtual memory spread across 4 partitions and three hard drives. Everything runs fine for me.

I thought I would give it a try. The idea was based on the premise that the first usable portion of any HD would be the fastest, due to being physically on the outer edge of the platter(s).

So, I took a existing install consisting of a C: and D: (20GB and 280GB respectively) and moshed around a bit with PartitionMagic to get a 2GB partition at the start of the drive. It just happened that D: wanted to stay D: and I ended up with Windows on E:

To top it all, I quite fancy having a go at dual-booting Ubuntu. Might wait and see on that one though :)

under what circumstances would you use up all of your
system's Ram, plus 6 Gigs of virtual memory? That's
insanity!

I run Photoshop, 3DSMax, Firefox and Blitz and I'm only
using 800-900 megs of my Ram.

Isn't it best to not have to use the virtual memory at all?

drew: Trust me, I've managed it.

May I ask what program is so memory-hungry? The
only program I know of that can be rediculously
inneficient with memory is Discreet's Combustion.
Is that what you're running?

Well first there was my program to calculate how many pairs of bunnies there would be after 10 years if each pair of bunnies reproduced once every month and each offspring pair was capable of reproducing on the second month.

Let me say that doing that with types is a bad idea. Your memory will be begging for mercy.

Now on another note, compiling and compressing pak files can be very expensive when you store the output in a bank only to write it to a stream later (just so that if there's an error, you won't end up with a gigantic corrupt pak file).

And, lastly (although I'm certain the applications running all the time [Photoshop, GTK Radiant, several different model editors, Visual Studio, ConTEXT, MSN, gile[s], and iTunes, etc.] contribute as well), I run three different test servers on my machine at any given time for.. well.. testing. I'm not sure how, but even with very little going on they somehow manage to take loads of memory.

Try editing a 4 gigabyte image, and see what happens.


Andy

You can't do that anyway as certain programs will refuse to run if there isn't a page file. I think Photoshop is one of them, actually...

Windows as a whole will run a lot less efficient without a paging file as well, ironically enough.

It will continue to try to unload unused stuff to virtual memory, since many components of windows simply assume its there... And when its not, you end up with a lot of slowdowns, temporary freezes, etc. while it tries to cope with that. Windows will run *much* smoother with a small swap file, than it will with none at all.

(Alternatively: you can use a 3rd party RAM-drive driver, where you can make a virtual disk in memory. Put your swap file on *it*)

I did the RAM disk think once, it ripped!

lol... may I ask what you needed the program for? Or is it some secret plan to take over the world in 10 years with bunnies? Actually, that wouldn't be so bad.

i i remember right.

windows runs normal with 8 Mb. (but i running it with 4mb too)
windows XP home runs normal with 256 Mb.. (but run it with 128 mb too)

what kind of windows are you running.. Vista ??


almoust forgot.. before i run windows.. i war runing.
Workbench 1.3 it only used 0.5 mb

and i cold start a Digipaint too and draw a good image on screen. while listening to a MOd file. and download files to disc from a BBS. in fact that machine worked faster than pc did at same time. (slow pc used awsome 2 mb ram)

let me see how many memmory slot do i need on a amiga 512 to have 2Gb of ram.. ahh 4000 512kb memmory that cost about 50$ each.. that is 200.000 $ no problem.. but where shall i put those memmory any one knows where the second slot is on a amiga 512.. cause i only find one expansion slot. (need to know cause i got 3999 memory more to put in use.)

Got a another stupid question..
if i had 4000 amiga i whold have 32 Ghz and 2000 mb in ram. :)

>almoust forgot.. before i run windows.. i war runing.
>Workbench 1.3 it only used 0.5 mb

...On my A500, with Workbench loaded it would have roughly 250K available.

Andy

Certainly seems to make a big difference.

After surfing for more info I changed C Swap size to 2-50 MB and put the main one on E 2000-2000MB.

Web pages loading faster, and I noticed when the computer started up that all of the icons of the desktop appeared in an instant rather than piecemeal.

Another tip: You may want to run a benchmark program and actually measure which of your drives is the fastest... In most cases it would be the optimal destination for the swap file.

Even if you have multiple partitions on a single physical drive, you may see faster transfer speeds on one partition versus the other, since the physical location on the disk is different -- the transfer speeds are not constant across an entire drive.

I would have expected XP to know where the fastest part of the drive is and put the pagefile there, at least on a single partition drive?

Maybe it does this, but certainly moving the file to another drive gains some speed.