What size should I make the pagefile?

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j4ckaL

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My system specs:

1GB RAM
250GB Hard Drive

I read an ARTICLE on this but it was a little hard for me to follow. I use my PC for gaming, watching movies, and downloading large files. What should I set the min. and max sizes for the pagefile to get the best performance?
 
thanks.

I have another related question.

I've read that changing the DisablePagingExecutive setting from its default of 0 to 1 in the registry may provide some gains in performance for machines with 1GB of memory or more. What it does is stop Windows from paging user-mode and kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to disk(whatever that means -.-).

What I'm asking is, should I change this setting?
 
So what would stopping Windows from paging user-mode and kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to disk do? Would it make games run better?
 
j4ckaL said:
thanks.

I have another related question.

I've read that changing the DisablePagingExecutive setting from its default of 0 to 1 in the registry may provide some gains in performance for machines with 1GB of memory or more. What it does is stop Windows from paging user-mode and kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to disk(whatever that means -.-).

What I'm asking is, should I change this setting?

Yes do that.

You'll probably want to enable the LargeSystemCache key as well

The "DisablePagingExecutive" entry in the registry prevents the kernel (the core of the XP OS) from being rolled out to a page file on disk. The effect of this part of the tweak is to cause the OS to cache the Kernel and its entourage to RAM instead of to disk, which makes XP far more responsive.

The "LargeSystemCache" registry entry forces XP to allocate all but 4MB of system memory, that is system memory, not available RAM, to the file system cache. The remaining 4MB of system memory is used for disk caching, though XP will allocate more memory if it is needed.

A modern hard disk will transfer sequential data to and from disk at up to 40MB per second, or even faster on some of the more expensive drives, but the LargeSystemCache tweak means that effective transfer speeds of 1GB per second or more can be obtained, depending on the amount of RAM in your system and its operating speed. This is achieved because the LargeSystemCache modification causes the OS to store data in RAM after it is read from disk. It means that the OS is always using the optimum amount of RAM instead of leaving it untouched for future use that may or may not occur. Without this part of the tweak, 200MB or more of RAM in a typical 512MB machine goes completely unused.

Some I/O intensive applications may take a hit in performance from changing the LargeSystemCache, so this particular component of the tweak should not be applied to a system that is running either SQL Server or Internet Information Server (IIS) because both of those applications perform their own caching.
 
j4ckaL said:
So what would stopping Windows from paging user-mode and kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to disk do? Would it make games run better?

No
 
i have a 5 gig partion set to a 4096 page which works very well and whats 5 gigs set aside with the size of hard drives these days.
 
King X13 said:
i have a 5 gig partion set to a 4096 page which works very well and whats 5 gigs set aside with the size of hard drives these days.

this is how mine is set up. a partition at the beginning of the second hdd
 
I'm using one of my old SCSI drives for my page file (4096) but I also have a 1Gb page file on the root drive which is necessary for full memory dumps as I have 1Gb of Ram.

Its all overkill of course, I doubt my system ever uses more than a couple of hundred meg page space.
 
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