Delete Pagefile?

Rezident

Rezident

Rezident

Soldato
Joined
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Dublin
On Vista, I wanted to move my pagefile off the main drive so I set it to no pagefile first, rebooted and then set it up on the D:drive. Now it shows up on the D: drive but the old pagefile.sys is also still on the C: drive and it's taking up 3.5gigs of space.

Is it safe to just delete it or what's the best way to get rid of it?
 
having the pagefile on a secondary drive isn't a very good plan.
windows only reads secondary drives after bootup, which means it will always have a pagefile on the primary (install) drive anyway.

anyway, it's only 3.5GB. HDD space is cheap-as-chips these days. cheaper, even.

get yourself a nice chinky 1TB drive and let those space-gremlins suffocate under huge piles of nothingness ;)
 
Space is cheap today, try running Photoshop or such with no Pagefile.

Best advise, leave Windows to Manage it, from XP onwards it does a good job.
 
ok but if you have like this:

DRIVE 1:
C: D:

Drive 2:
E: F: G:

Then it's OK to put the pagefile on partition D: as it's the same drive right?
 
I tried doing that on my RAID array but there are some quirks in vista (well on my setup anyway). The page file kept reverting back to drive C: so eventually I gave up and left it that way. I haven't really noticed a difference to having a dedicated partition.
 
There's no point messing around with the pagefile. Just leave Windows to take care of it itself - you have enough RAM to hopefully ensure that the pagefile won't get hit much anyway.
 
But I keep hearing that there is a performance advantage in having the pagefile on a different drive to your OS, once the drives are the same speed.

Is there a way to do this in Vista or will it keep re-creating a pagefile on C: even if there is already one on D: (separate physical drives)?
 
There would potentially be a slight performance gain if you didn't have much RAM. When you're over 3GB you have more than enough for today so Windows should hardly need to page out.

I'd be very surprised if you could notice any difference whatsoever. I didn't, even when I used to have 1GB of RAM back in the day.
 
it's safe to delete it yes, it won't let you if it's in use

bad idea to setup like this by the way..

Drive 1 = c partition, d partition (pagefile here)



good idea to do this
Drive 1 = c (pagefile here)
Drive 2 = x (2nd pagefile here)
-se them as windows managed sizes
 
The best way to avoid any Disk thrashing and any bad bombouts with Vista is to install your program file to another drive to avoid clutter. Your Boot Partition is then your survival guide and also your UMST. Because PhotoShop uses the Clipboard and History indexing the same way Ms Office does you are bound to a Library index. Your Activation Status and your History status will always be stored on C:. But by freeing the Program files directory in the Active Directory status you can quite happilly trnasfer your Program files directory to another HD because the Execute path has nothing to do with the Pagefile setup. Saving Disk space in this manner enables you to do your work with less interrupts from background processes.
At anytime you can change the pagefile size. Sometimes when working with Photoshop I find it quite easy to go into my Enviromental variables and reuce the pagefile to 0mb and once rebooted I re-assign the size of the pagefile to the style and type of work I am doing. from 200mb-to 12GB. and then when I want windows to handle it again I re-assign it back to Vista to Handle. This can be done in both versions 32 and 64 bit Vista, because it only works in 32bit or x86 mode.
If the above is of any use to to there are many more tips on the Adobe website for you to consider.
 
Try it and see, its still dumb to have no page file as Windows since XP manages it fine.

There is countless threads asking same Q every week or so.

I dont believe in Partitions apart from Beta Testing where I dual boot, I dont believe in putting APP's on diff partitions or HDD and that incs the Page File.

Tried it all and its basically IMO a waste of time.

Vista thrashes HDD's, I know enough to get it to be less so but its still there at bootup and for 5mins after it.
 
Having the page file on a physically seperate HD works very well in some cases. However, it's not going to show huge gains unless you are constantly hitting a point of an I/O bottleneck on your OS or primary system drive. You won't see any difference simply checking emails but, as noted, try a big Photoshop job.

Also, some programs such as Photoshop create their own "scratch" file independently from the OS page file. So, if you are running your OS, Photoshop, and 2 different paging files on a single HD you will have I/O bottleneck issues. So, under some usages, the page file on a seperate HD IS a good idea. Having the page file on a 4gb I-RAM is even better.

As to the original OP, no, don't delete your page file. You may want to tweak it or experiment some, depending on your usage and needs.
 
Yellowbeard said:
So, under some usages, the page file on a seperate HD IS a good idea. Having the page file on a 4gb I-RAM is even better.
Click to expand...

Surely this only helps if the second drive is on a second controller? The firm I work for sets up their systems (Win XP) with two partitions on a Raid 0 array. The page File is forced to live on the second (larger) partition, mainly for space considerations. Since both partitions are on the same 2 physical discs its all a waste of time really.

I find that letting windows look after things is fine thankyou.

If you believe that having lots of memory means you don't need a page file look now at your page file useage (CTRL-ALT-DEL). I'm just browsing now with Outlook open on the other screen, and with 2GByte memory, and have 1.2GByte free, yet Windows has allocated 0.7 GBytes to the page file. Don't ask me why, it just has! Until Microsoft accepts that systems can work without a page file just live with it.
 
malcolm said:
Surely this only helps if the second drive is on a second controller? The firm I work for sets up their systems (Win XP) with two partitions on a Raid 0 array. The page File is forced to live on the second (larger) partition, mainly for space considerations. Since both partitions are on the same 2 physical discs its all a waste of time really.
Click to expand...
It does not necessarily need to be on a seperate controller but, I did state that it needs to be on a physically seperate HD. As noted, the page file on an I-RAM works even better.
 
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