Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

[Serpento]

Ive done a Forum Search and a Yahoo Search on Disabling the Page File, and i have seen many people saying it does not improve your system, or it does not mest up your comp, and some people sayings page file is bull on performance...

Seriously, Can someone be honest and tell me about this "Page File"?

I tried myself, but got some warnings saying that 1GB of RAM isn't enough, 2GB is, but some say theres no point of disabling it if you have that much RAM.
Does it really damage your comp? Does it really improve your gaming?

Thanks!

[LuckySeven]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

No it does not improve anything. No matter how much ram you have. If you have plenty of ram you don't need a big page file though. Personally I don't know if disabling Page File can mess up or damage system, but when I tried it, no harm was made during performance benches to check if it improves it.

[Stormy{CAN}]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/virtualmemory.htm

[camper.]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

The page file is just additional memory for the PC to use when it feels like it (not always when the RAM is full). It really depends on what you want to do. For battlefield 2, unless you have 4GB of RAM, disabling the page file is the worst thing you can do. If you have 2GB of RAM and only use Microsoft Word, then disabling the page file is the best thing you could do. The more RAM you have, the lower you can set the page file, but it really depends on what you want to do. Disabling it for BF2 with only 1GB of RAM will make windows DIE a quick death.

It will NOT "damage your comp", but it will NOT "improve your gaming" either. I guess people thought that by disabling the page file, Windows would stuff everything into RAM, but what use is that if you're trying to fit 780MB of BF2 data into about 700MB of free RAM?

Anyway, go to My Computer => Properties => Advanced Tab => Performance Settings button => Advanced Tab and set Memory Usage to "System Cache". This keeps the data that would have been paged in RAM, if I remember correctly. Better than disabling the SWAP file altogether.

Bottom line, unless you have enough RAM to run a file server, DO NOT DISABLE THE SWAP FILE. The end.

[UNDIESRULES]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

Adifferent thing altogether, if you have a 2nd hard drive and set your page file to use this instead of you 'C' drive you will see about 3 fps better in games. Not much but every little helps.

[Stormy{CAN}]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

Anyway, go to My Computer => Properties => Advanced Tab => Performance Settings button => Advanced Tab and set Memory Usage to "System Cache". This keeps the data that would have been paged in RAM, if I remember correctly. Better than disabling the SWAP file altogether.

Bottom line, unless you have enough RAM to run a file server

then why suggest they basically do just that,

Large System Cache

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management]

"LargeSystemCache"=dword:000000001



This setting is also achieved by going to Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced > Memory usage = System Cache.



Under XP this tweak could be of some value under various odd circumstances. However, it causes problems with many drivers/hardware/applications.*** This tweak is really designed for machines running as a server. If you use this tweak and have problems don’t be whining at the driver/application writers for writing code that takes advantage of the way XP uses memory. They didn’t ask you to turn your machine into a server.

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks11.htm

And Microsoft's take on it,

Description

Determines whether the system maintains a standard size or a large size file system cache , and influences how often the system writes changed pages to disk.

Increasing the size of the file system cache generally improves server performance, but it reduces the physical memory space available to applications and services. Similarly, writing system data less frequently minimizes use of the disk subsystem, but the changed pages occupy memory that might otherwise be used by applications.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/regentry/29933.mspx?mfr=true

may say Windows 2000, but the same applies to XP.

[camper.]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

then why suggest they basically do just that,



http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks11.htm

And Microsoft's take on it,



http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true

may say Windows 2000, but the same applies to XP.

You can do that registry tweak by setting the Memory Settings button to "background processes" as I said ;-). Don't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut...

[Stormy{CAN}]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

You can do that registry tweak by setting the Memory Settings button to "background processes" as I said ;-). Don't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut...

Which would mean that things running in the background get a higher cpu priority than the current running process. Not too good when running a game.

[camper.]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

Which would mean that things running in the background get a higher cpu priority than the current running process. Not too good when running a game.

Fair enough, I read on TweakXP (I think) that this supposedly keeps Windows from paging to the swap file.

[Mad Ad]

Re: Page File: A bunch of bull? or...

If you can show me some test or something that proves that running with the swapfile on makes pc's slower then Ill change mine at the same time as yours.

But since XPs swapfile management is soooo much better than win98 was, I dont think Ill be changing it anytime soon.