How do I set up my pagefile for best performance?

[frankienyc123]

Ok I have an AMD 4200x2 dual core system with 2gigs of ram and I have two harddrives, one 74gig WD RAptor which I have XP pro and all my programs installed on then I have a 300gig Maxtor drive I use for storage of music, movies, pictures, text ...etc. My question is which drive should I set up my pagefile on and how large should it be? Ive read the best thing is to keep the pagefile on a seperate disk from XP, but in my case since the Raptor is considerably faster then the Maxtor drive, is this still true?? Also is there any benefit from putting half on each drive? Instead of say 3gig max on one drive put 1.5 on each of the two?? I know years ago when 256mb of ram was common they told you to make the page file 1.5x your ram for the initial size and 3x the ram for the max size. Is this still true of modern systems with 2gigs of ram?? Please help mest wanna make sure i have it setup for best performance. Although with 2guigs of ram in XP i doubt the pagefile is going to be used very often I usually have over 1gig free even with a few programs running.
Thanks

 

[ara]

i personally would put it on a raptor, however, others WILL disagree, it depends on how you think it's going to be used. If the computer is going to be intensive on the raptor excluding the PF then i'd say a seperate drive, but if it's going to be casual use, i would say it's a good idea to put it on the raptor... this is my personal opinion and preference, and like i said, others i will disagree.

Ara

 

[edklite]

P4 2.0 GHz 1Gb of Ram, Pagefile disabled

P4 3.8 GHz 4GB of Ram, Pagefile disabled

C2D 2.16 2GB of Ram, pagefile disabled

in short, if this is your home pc then disable it, pagefile was useful in the old days of 64MB of Ram, my P4 2.0 has had page file disabled for over 4 years with no problems running multiple apps, life folding@home, opera, games, P2P, photo editing, etc.

nothing is bad is gonna happen, disable it, use it for a week then go back and enable it again, if at that time, your PC does not feel like a turtle comparing to when you had it off, I will change my name to what ever you like

 

[ara]

i had my PF turned off with 1.5 GB of ram on a 3 ghz P4... photoshop would refuse to open, but i was otherwise fine... just giving a heads up...

Ara

 

[frankienyc123]

Ive tried disabling it completely and had some trouble with some of my software, Photoshop is one of them that wouldnt open at all. Im not really sure what disabling it would really gain you though, except saving a few gigs of hard drive space??

 

[ara]

theoretically it will speed up your system under certain circumstances, basically that windows will not have a virtual drive and would be forced to use faster and quicker ram... although the side effect is that if you have a program that relies on the PF as a scratch disk or otherwise would gulp up a lot of ram, you lose out on performance drastically by either not being able to run the program or that it would have to load different elements from the hard disk anyway, this time seeking to the program's directory to fetch required information...

Ara

 

[edklite]

theoretically nothing, that was in the old days, my PC is running faster with the pagefile off, also photoshop opens fine in mine with the pagefile disabled