virtual memory pagefile

[Tahmeed797]

Hi

I wanted to ask how much virtual memory should I set if I have 16gb of ram and one hdd of 1tb, I mainly game and youtube alot.

M asking this because I've recently gotten some paged in non paged area blue screens, and when I checked how much virtual memory I had the windows was managing it with all of my ram.

Can someone help me out?

Thanks!

 

[atljsf]

the idea is never ever use pagefile, at all

pagefile is ram in hard disk, if a game or program you run decides to use it, will be come slow and hard disk will make lots of noise, all will become very slow

the idea years ago was have a pagefile equal to your ram or 1.5 times bigger

having 16 gb of ram, you can leave it auto or disable it, depends on your pc usage

the blue screens you mention, under windows 7? on what programs?

is it a old build or new build, have you checked ram, hard disk and other parts to discard hardware problems?

 

[Tahmeed797]

Hi thanks for the reply.

I have windows 10, I have never gotten a blue screen while gaming no matter how many hours I play, bsod happens randomly I would assume when I idle my pc or when m youtubing alot.

I built this pc my self about 3 years ago.

Intel i5 4690k
Msi z97 gaming 5
Corsair 16gb ram
Msi gtx 1050 ( had a 280x )
Seagate 1tb
Corsair cs650m

I've recently gotten alot of bsod, I asked here for help but I got almost no reply, types of bsod

Irql not less or equal
Dpc watchdog violation
Paged in non pages area

Can you help me out ?

Thanks!

 

[atljsf]

i haven't experienced any of those errors so can't give tips to those exact errors

the usual suspects, check hard disk for errors, reinstall windows 10 to get rid of messed up files and drivers and leave pagefile to auto, if you like, force it to 16 gbs, also the low limit to 400 megabytes, or 1 gb, that space will be wasted but perhaps will give you peace of mind

since it is a old build, you could also run some memtest, not going to show much if your games work well, but worth to do it

if you can, replace sata cables with new cables

run cristaldiskinfo to check state of hard disk, errors reading or errors on sectors can do some errors you have but as i said, haven't experienced any of those under windows 10

more likely a problem with drivers and a specific app or program you use that is messing up ram usage

 

[das_stig]

In the real world 16GB should means no swapfile, but this is Windows and it is generally happier if it has a swapfile, even if it doesn't use it. Just set a static 1GB swapfile on the HDD.

 

[Ralston18]

You can use Event Viewer to look for error codes and warning messages that were logged just before or at the time of the BSODs.

Very likely you will find some corresponding log entries that will provide more information (right click) about what happened.

Also, if you have not already done so, open your case and check all connections, plugs, chip seatings, jumpers, card seatings, etc. Not at all unusual for them to slowly work loose over time. Especially RAM modules...

Just gently rock everything back down and securely into place.

Clean the insides while the case is open. Carefully blow out dust and debris via a can of compressed air. Read the instructions!

 

[Tahmeed797]

Hi thanks for all of your replies,

I just ran crystaldiskinfo, on health status it says caution, when i hover my mouse over it it says:

Caution: [05] Reallocated sectors count : 8
Caution: [C5] Current Pending sector count : 8
Caution: [C6] Uncorrectable sector count : 8

Any ideas?
Thanks

 

[johnbl]

reboot your machine then start task manager and go to the performance tab, select memory and see how much memory the OS is actually using. I set the pagefile to 1.5 times that value as a default. Windows is a paging OS, if you set it to zero, windows will just set up internal paging to memory rather than disk. for some errors you can set the page file to zero and then delete the hidden c:\pagefile.sys, reboot and create another pagefile.sys. It helps with certain malware problems and problems where your pagefile.sys is located on bad sectors of your hard drive. (this assumes the new pagefile.sys will be located on different sectors of the drive)

with the errors your reported for your bugchecks you would want to update the BIOS and all of the motherboard drivers from your motherboard vendors website. Then run memtest86 to confirm your memory timings are correct.
generally, if you get memory errors that cause your bugchecks then the error code will be 0xffffffffc0000005
the error code is generally the second parameter in the bugcheck code.

be sure to update the drivers, many motherboards require custom drivers. if you run the generic windows drivers you will often get memory corruptions that will cause the various bugchecks you mentioned.
(motherboard sound driver is a likely suspect as it often conflicts with the GPU sound driver, the CPU video sound driver and USB sound drivers. (the generic version provided by windows can corrupt the data from any sound device)

windows 8.x and above will attempt to fix errors due to failing sectors on your hard drive. It will copy data from bad sectors to a good sector (it might take a lot of retries)
hard drives have failure rates of about 24 % the first year with about 16% failure for each year after that.
after 3 years you should expect to start to get some errors and make sure your data is backed up to the cloud.
If you wipe the drive be sure to do a full format rather than a quick format and the bad sectors will be found and marked as bad. (I would not bother if you are running windows 10, unless you just migrated from windows 7)



the info below means that the drive is attempting to move data to a new sector and mark the old sector as bad. to do this it has to read the bad sector over and over until it gets a clean copy. sometimes it just can not do this. you might be able to boot into bios and leave the drive idle for a few hours in the hope that the drives firmware will fix the problem while the drive is not in use by windows.

if you had any idea what sectors were failing you could delete the files from it and the firmware would mark the sectors as bad.
I would just delete the pagefile, all of the temp internet browser files and do general disk cleanup in the hope you delete files on the bad sectors. (it is kind of a hit or miss method, it would be better to do a full format and reinstall if you are really worried about it)

in any case you would want to confirm your windows core files are intact: run cmd.exe or powershell as an admin then run
sfc.exe /scannow
then run
dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
(this gets files from the Microsoft server and will fix problems where malware infects your storage driver)

Hi thanks for all of your replies,

I just ran crystaldiskinfo, on health status it says caution, when i hover my mouse over it it says:

Caution: [05] Reallocated sectors count : 8
Caution: [C5] Current Pending sector count : 8
Caution: [C6] Uncorrectable sector count : 8

Any ideas?
Thanks

 

[Tahmeed797]

Hi

When I rebooted my pc, the amount of memory it was using was 1.9/15.9gb.

I can confirm you my drivers are up to date, I've been getting these bsod for at least a week now, and every where I search about it, they point me at driver, I've made sure my every single driver is up to date including audio lan graphics even my mobo bios is up to date.

I've never overclocked anything, for the last 3 years my pc has been running on default factory settings.

I haven't ran memtest86 uptil now cuz I don't know how to, I was wondering if the windows memtest would be fine?

As of sfc scan, I've ran it a few times but it says files were found but could not be repaired or something like that I don't remember, plus I can tell you I ran it as administrator.

As doe dism restore health, I did that but it stopped at 67% it also created a dism log files but I ofc don't understand or I don't know how to read it, also I don't know how to upload it or something like that so I can attach it here so someone here can read it.

Can you guide me?

Thanks!!

 

[johnbl]

you should run the memtest86, it is on its own boot image and will do a much better job at testing memory. (it is a trusted test, if it says there is a problem you know it is a real problem) since windows 10 is now doing memory compression any memory timing problem or hardware error can cause bugchecks. winodows compresses files and data to memory then expands it when needed. The memory manager will even page the data to disk. Any problems will show up as a memory manager error bugcheck. (single bit corruptions are pretty common and paging the memory to disk saves the corruption if your system sleeps, corruptions written to the pagefile get reloaded into memory that was ok(delete pagefile and make a new one)

I would ignore the errors from the system file checker (sfc.exe)

run the windows update and reboot then
try running the dism.exe command several times (reboot after each)
sometimes it will do one fix and get blocked from making the second fix until the system reboots.

other than that you would have to look at the log and search for errors to see what is failing.

you might also go into windows control panel device manager and disable any sound source that does not have a speaker connected to it. then reboot.

Hi

When I rebooted my pc, the amount of memory it was using was 1.9/15.9gb.

I can confirm you my drivers are up to date, I've been getting these bsod for at least a week now, and every where I search about it, they point me at driver, I've made sure my every single driver is up to date including audio lan graphics even my mobo bios is up to date.

I've never overclocked anything, for the last 3 years my pc has been running on default factory settings.

I haven't ran memtest86 uptil now cuz I don't know how to, I was wondering if the windows memtest would be fine?

As of sfc scan, I've ran it a few times but it says files were found but could not be repaired or something like that I don't remember, plus I can tell you I ran it as administrator.

As doe dism restore health, I did that but it stopped at 67% it also created a dism log files but I ofc don't understand or I don't know how to read it, also I don't know how to upload it or something like that so I can attach it here so someone here can read it.

Can you guide me?

Thanks!!

 

[atljsf]

so everything points to a damaged hard disk

about memtest you need t download a iso form memtest page and then follow a manual on how to run memtest

i would start by backing up my files and then buy a new hard disk

the memtest might or might not give a error but the damaged sectors are a concern, i would back up files as soon as possible

 

[Tahmeed797]

Hi

I ran a chkdsk /r and now m booting into a black screen every single time, what is up with this?

 

[atljsf]

damaged hard disk, damaged files

you rant the checkdisk too late

time for a new hard disk

install windows on a new hard disk, remove the damaged hard disk and later add again the damaged one, try to copy files from it if it allows it, if not, well, you have backups right?

 

[gamerk316]

Not to get off track, in regards to the Page File, it's generally best to leave it at "system managed". It's only used if a memory request can't be honored (not enough free RAM), which would result in a BSOD otherwise. It dynamically grows as needed (eg: More RAM hungry applications = larger page file to support it).

 

[Colif]

Hi thanks for all of your replies,

I just ran crystaldiskinfo, on health status it says caution, when i hover my mouse over it it says:

Caution: [05] Reallocated sectors count : 8
Caution: [C5] Current Pending sector count : 8
Caution: [C6] Uncorrectable sector count : 8

Any ideas?
Thanks

backup info and replace drive, its saying its got 8 sectors that need to be replaced with good ones but it doesn't have 8 good sectors left. Save info off drive before it dies. One of those scores giving a caution is bad enough, 3 means drive is on its way out.

As for page file, leave it auto. Win 10 will never use it anyway as it prefers to compress any closed files into ram and will only empty ram if you need to use it. Turning it off or reducing its size means that if you ever do use 16gb of ram, PC won't have 16gb of hdd space to put it all in and will probably give you an out of memory error.

it won't use 16gb off hdd space if you hardly use ram anyway, mine is set to auto, I have 16gb yet page file is only 1gb