Would a separate HD for File Paging speed things up?
- Thread starter Holiday
- Start date
Windows doesn't quite work that way. It goes by the amount of drive space available on the drive you install it to. The paging file is essentially reserved drive space used for virtual memory to supliment the amount of physical memory installed on the system. When your drive gets too low on free space you will then see low drive space and low memory error messages indicating the lack of space available for using a paging file when the installed memory is filled.
The only thing that can help somewhat is either disabling the creation of the paging file or using the customize option to increase the size to see where you are going to see the actual best performance results while trying to multitask with a single core cpu. The screen shot here shows how to go into the advanced setting when right clicking on the MyComputer icon.
The type of programs as well as the number of items that automatically startup along with Windows and run in the background will also play a role as well as keeping the system registry clean from orphan entries left there when uninstallers fail to remove everything associated with a program. One excellent freeware opens to a main window for manual removal of reg keys when going to remove a problem or the option to use the automatic cleanup method through the "tools>registry cleanup>"do them all" option seen with the RegCleaner. http://www.majorgeeks.com/RegCleaner_d460.html
Is a lack of hard drive space causing slowdowns when there isn't enough space for the paging file? The "crap cleaner" as it referred to at it's own site is actually the CCleaner that removes useless temp folders left over from installers and other loose files on the drive that have no purpose. Be careful however if you have a habit of storing certain file types in folders you create on your own with this freeware. http://www.ccleaner.com/
Have you defragged your hard drive lately? The analyzer will show much fragmentation is seen in percentage. Once you see it climb up it's time for that.
The type of programs as well as the number of items that automatically startup along with Windows and run in the background will also play a role as well as keeping the system registry clean from orphan entries left there when uninstallers fail to remove everything associated with a program. One excellent freeware opens to a main window for manual removal of reg keys when going to remove a problem or the option to use the automatic cleanup method through the "tools>registry cleanup>"do them all" option seen with the RegCleaner. http://www.majorgeeks.com/RegCleaner_d460.html
Is a lack of hard drive space causing slowdowns when there isn't enough space for the paging file? The "crap cleaner" as it referred to at it's own site is actually the CCleaner that removes useless temp folders left over from installers and other loose files on the drive that have no purpose. Be careful however if you have a habit of storing certain file types in folders you create on your own with this freeware. http://www.ccleaner.com/
Have you defragged your hard drive lately? The analyzer will show much fragmentation is seen in percentage. Once you see it climb up it's time for that.
Sure you can do that, but if the drive you put the pagefile is not faster than the drive with the OS its not going to be any faster!
Once you try custom assigning the paging file to other then the OS drive the obvious lag seen in drive access time would more likely slow things down. The screen shot seen above is one from the XP primary as you will note. Vista has it's own updated method and settings for system performance. The general tips on periodically using a registry cleaner to eliminate now useless unattached entries and cleaning up excessive temp folders left over on the drive over a period of time as well as other maintainence will do more to see the best performance overall.
EDIT:
From the screen shot of the Vista installation here the paging file increased from twice the size of the installed 2gb of memory to 2 1/2 times. Many of the same functions seen in XP still apply to the newer version. With Vista's additional features and a slight lag seen when booting from a secondary drive the larger size was set to evaluate the effect on performance in general.
EDIT:
From the screen shot of the Vista installation here the paging file increased from twice the size of the installed 2gb of memory to 2 1/2 times. Many of the same functions seen in XP still apply to the newer version. With Vista's additional features and a slight lag seen when booting from a secondary drive the larger size was set to evaluate the effect on performance in general.
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