Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt (
More info?)
On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:21:10 +0000 (UTC), "Carl"
<me@theworld.universe> wrote:
>i have 2gb of dual channel pc3200 ram in my amd 4000 system. i set the
>virtual memory to zero to defrag my hard drive about a week ago. i noticed
>that i had not reset it afterwards, i usually would set it to a fixed size,
>2048mb. i have not noticed any performance loss in windows without the
>virtual memory. could you run your system fine without it?
>
IF you have your system set to use a pagefile, it _will_
write to that page file even before you run out of physical
memory. Not a lot (of data), but it may still happen quite
frequently... this frequency I'm unsure of.
Running without the pagefile should indeed slightly speed up
the system. However, like another poster I too found that
games can crash even when there was a small pagefile (set to
a ramdrive as an intermediate test of whether "any" swapfile
would resolve the problem, if a small one would suffice- it
was set to 64MB, IIRC). The system had not come near
running out of physical memory, and still Half Life 2 would
crash- not immediately but perhaps every 25 minutes or so
(on average). It was clearly the pagefile that caused it,
(or rather, the fix was...) going back to a traditional
pagefile resulted in no further crashes for the dozen or so
hours more it took to finish the game.
What I usually prefer to do regarding the swapfile, is limit
the size of the OS partition to only a smaller percentage of
the whole disk, under 12GB, such that the next partition is
still a relatively fast part of the disk, and place the
swapfile at the beginnning of this 2nd parititon. That is,
on systems with only one HDD.
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