Optimal paging file vista

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Clean Install Windows 10 the Easy Way. The Best Tech Newsletter Anywhere Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. For instance, if you had a computer with 1GB of memory, your paging file would be roughly mb, but if you add another 1GB of memory to your computer to make a total of 2GB, now when you look at the paging file, it will have automatically increased: You can turn this setting on and off by right-clicking the Computer icon, clicking the Advanced System Settings link, then clicking the Settings button under Performance: Click the Advanced tab, and you should see the current size of the paging file as in the first screenshot.

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Click System and Maintenance, and then click System. Click the Advanced tab, click Settings in the Performance section, and then click the Advanced tab. In the Virtual Memory section, click Change. Deselect the box for "automatically manage paging file size for all drives. From the Drive list, select a hard drive that has at least three times the amount of your computer's installed RAM. For best performance, choose a hard disk not used for the scratch disks.

Note: To determine the amount of space available on a drive, click the drive letter. Mainframe computers from the s were already using it! It made a lot of sense when RAM was measured in dozens of kilobytes. These days most mainstream computers have way more RAM than the user is likely to need unless they routinely run memory-hungry applications. Given that your computer has the right amount of RAM, there may still come a day when something makes RAM paging necessary.

One of the most common pieces of advice is to set your page file to a different drive than your operating system drive. The thing is, most new computers have a solid state drive SSD as their primary disk these days. While SSDs using the SATA interface still have to queue read and write requests sequentially, they are orders of magnitude faster than mechanical drives with spinning platters.

The logic behind this makes sense, since hard drives have to queue requests for reads and writes. So if Windows is trying to swap information from your page file and also trying to use the disk for other purposes it will all slow down to a crawl. If you put your page file on a separate hard drive, then this problem goes away. On mechanical hard drives, fragmentation can also be an issue. Files are not stored continuously, but written into any available gaps left by deleted files.

This means that over time as files are written and deleted, a specific file might exist in bits and pieces all over the drive. If your page file is physically scattered all over the disk platter, it takes longer for the drive heads to put it all together.

On solid state drives, this is a non-issue. If you are using a mechanical drive, creating a dedicated partition after first defragmenting the drive in question can be a good way around this.