Does setting the page file to zero help?

[gameon238]

Hi

I have a Vista 64 Dual Quod Core machine with 16GB of RAM.

Will it speed up my system to not use a paging file?

I have 4 300GB SAS hard drives. 2 are on separate partitions and 2 are joined. Is there anything I can do to make sure I'm getting the best out of the system?

Matt

 

[Scotteq]

With that much memory I sincerely doubt it is using the page file for much, if anything. So yeah, you are more than likely to be perfectly safe in shutting it off if you feel some need to do so.

But since your system probably isn't using it anyways, there wouldn't be any performance difference either. What you may want to do is set it to some fixed value, say 500MB or so. Not because you're getting any additional speed, but rather to save a little bit of disc space.

 

[gameon238]

Hi Scotteq

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I'll follow your advice.

Cheers and have a good weekend

 

[pinaplex]

windows reserves space for the pagefile even if you disable it. so change the value to the minimum allowed pagefile (16mb) before you disable it completely.

 

[notherdude]

I asked Ed Bott this question, along with some other 'experts' who chimed in, and they seemed to suggest that XP may have benefited from turning off the page file but that Vista would not and might indeed have problems if you did. FWIW

Personally I have tried no pagefile, a minimum pagefile and letting Windows manage it and I could see no difference on my 8 gig system - I decided to play it safe and let Windows manage it until I could track down some objective evidence.

 

[pinaplex]

notherdude - i've been running my 8gb system with no pagefile for the past 6 months or so. I haven't had any crashes or bluescreens due to vista 64 running out of memory. I can't say if disabling it improves performance, but my system is still very responsive with no slowdowns. so i guess it "doesn't hurt" to turn off the pagefile if you have enough ram...=)

 

[notherdude]

notherdude - i've been running my 8gb system with no pagefile for the past 6 months or so. I haven't had any crashes or bluescreens due to vista 64 running out of memory. I can't say if disabling it improves performance, but my system is still very responsive with no slowdowns. so i guess it "doesn't hurt" to turn off the pagefile if you have enough ram...=)

pinaplex I tend to agree with you - I tried it too for several months and I don't recall anything more than the usual browser crash from time to time, with one possible exception - Aero/dreamscene seemed to crash a lot. It doesn't anymore but I honestly don't know why it stopped - drivers, pagefile, MS patch, who knows? Of course many people run very different applications and combos so it is hard for us to generalize from our own experience. That is why I added Ed Bott's opinion - I honestly don't know the answer to this question.

 

[soulz9]

I disabled it. And I saw improved performance only when starting Mozilla Firefox.

Before it used to take around 30 - 40 sec, but now it takes 2 secs. So in my case its huge improvement, and I never gotten any BSOD.

 

[Scotteq]

<curious> The Pagefile is used when memory is full as a place to store data temporarily so the memory space can be used for another active program.... There should be no difference at all when launching apps. Are you sure there isn't/wasn't something else going on?