Can I afford to disable my page file?

[Timstertimster]

In win7 i used to disable this and never had issues.

In my usage patterns I noticed that my 8GB RAM are plenty. I usually don't go above 60% usage for that.

Since my system is in an SSD and I understand that page files do a lot of writing and reading data I kind of figure why bother with it.

If my machine crashes I won't bother recovering anything. I'll just do a clean boot. Also I always turn off my machine when I'm not using it so it's usually running from a clean boot every day.

Does win10 "need" to have it set? Does it make any difference if I disable it?

 

[johnbl]

Windows is a paging operating system. If you disable the pagefile on disk windows will set aside some of your RAM to handle paging operations. Only things that will fail will be the memory dump when your system crashes and programs that require lots of virtual memory. Feel free to turn off the paging, you can turn it back on at any time. I found that with 16 GB of memory I just did not need the pagefile. I even found I could pull my ssd out of my running machine and it took hours for the machine to crash because a of some scheduled task needed to be loaded from disk. The more memory you have, the less your system will page to the ssd.

Note I ran for months without a pagefile but now have it turned on since running with default settings is just more likely to work. I created a small pagefile and let it grow as needed.

For most newer ssd you really do not have to worry about paging as a cause of ssd failure. Read operations do not cause blocks to fail. Each block can be written to 200 or 300 times before it would fail and be disabled by the drives firmware.

 

[Colif]

Win 10 handles ram differently to previous versions of windows. When you close a program, instead of dumping the closed data onto ssd, it compresses it in ram. It does this to speed up PC as if you reopen the program again, it is much faster to get the data from ram than ssd/hdd

It only uses the page file if you use all your ram and want to load something else in, this would be where not having a page file would bite you. You would get an out of memory error (note its not an out of ram error, you can run out of memory and still have spare ram) as windows has promised programs space it cannot provide.

But if you hardly ever use all your ram, the PC won't actually create a large page file and waste space. I have mine set to system controlled, max Page file could be 16gb to match my ram but in actual fact its only 1gb.

SSD also have space free you cannot access to use for spare blocks if need be. The bigger the SSD, the more free space it has in reserve for error correction.