Disabling pagefile in vista?

Teki187

Teki187

Teki187

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If i was to disable pagefile in vista, would i see a performance increase?

If so how do you do it?

Using 64bit vista, 2x250gb HDD's and 4gb of ram.
 
Its not the best idea anymore especially with todays apps having big memory footprints, not to mention games. Back during the Win98 days it was ok to do so but it would cause performance issues now.
 
Teki187 said:
If i was to disable pagefile in vista, would i see a performance increase?

If so how do you do it?

Using 64bit vista, 2x250gb HDD's and 4gb of ram.
Click to expand...

There is a was test done recently & it would lead to crashes in the end & only with 8GB of ram would you be able to get away with it to any extent but even 8GB can get used up with the right Software.
 
A better idea is to research hacking windows so that it stops putting bits of OS in the pagefile for no reason. There are some naughty versions that come pre-altered, but as fat as I know it can be done after the fact too.

NEVER turn it off althogether.
Make it very small if you must. My XP on a 4GB box had only 100MB of swap. Everything ran brilliantly and the only error I ever got would be when the machine had been sitting idle for hours....."windows doesn't have enough virtual memory". Proof positive that it does actually spend it's spare time idly wasting system resources, otherwise it may have noticed half way through a game don't you think.
 
thegoonden said:
A better idea is to research hacking windows so that it stops putting bits of OS in the pagefile for no reason. There are some naughty versions that come pre-altered, but as fat as I know it can be done after the fact too.

NEVER turn it off althogether.
Make it very small if you must. My XP on a 4GB box had only 100MB of swap. Everything ran brilliantly and the only error I ever got would be when the machine had been sitting idle for hours....."windows doesn't have enough virtual memory". Proof positive that it does actually spend it's spare time idly wasting system resources, otherwise it may have noticed half way through a game don't you think.
Click to expand...

Erm that's not good. Please read up on this subject (plenty of threads on here).

Disabling the page file is ridiculous, it severely impacts performance of the OS in general and physical memory is wasted needlessly.
 
A while ago I read something on http://www.tweakguides.com about pagefiles....and i've used this method ever since...Basically disable the pagefile and then defrag whatever driver you will put it on. The dude recommends the fasted non-system drive you have. THEN setup the pagefile on that drive. Because the drive is defragged, it'll take up one continuous chunk of space on the drive making it easier to read...Seems logical to me - also, lowering the pagefile size or disabling it altogether so that the computer is "forced" to use RAM - that's just a silly idea...in all practicality it doesn't work that way!
 
In XP maybe it helped sometimes but in Vista it doesn't sine Vista uses RAM effectively anyway.
 
Had it disabled for ages in Vista 32 with 4GB Ram and it is slightly quicker for me than with it enabled. This is on a 32Mb cache Samsung 750GB HD. Under XP 32 with 4GB have found no real performance difference with it enabled or not.
 
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Define "slightly quicker"? Are you sure you aren't getting tangled up in a placebo effect?

4GB of RAM on an average desktop PC is going to keep all the frequently accessed pages of memory in physical memory. So they are never going to be paged out...
 
mrk said:
In XP maybe it helped sometimes but in Vista it doesn't sine Vista uses RAM effectively anyway.
Click to expand...

It didn't help XP either. Other than Superfetch, Vista and XP have very similar memory management. Few tweaks here and there. But certainly nothing majorly different about the way virtual memory works.

Virtual memory is a computer science concept and has been pretty much unchanged for 25 years.

Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory
 
NathanE said:
Define "slightly quicker"? Are you sure you aren't getting tangled up in a placebo effect?

4GB of RAM on an average desktop PC is going to keep all the frequently accessed pages of memory in physical memory. So they are never going to be paged out...
Click to expand...
By feel. Vista just feels slightly quicker with no pagefile. With it sometimes there is a minor delay in something as simple as page transitions in IE if I have say 20-30 pages open at once as opposed to nopage has a very consistent feel to how quickly pages open. Boot times are about the same once the super/pre-fetching has finished (this is on a QX6850) on my X6800 Vista feels much quicker still than the quad with nopage and the boot time is approx 10 secs quicker even with a slower HD!
 
AWPC said:
By feel. Vista just feels slightly quicker with no pagefile. With it sometimes there is a minor delay in something as simple as page transitions in IE if I have say 20-30 pages open at once as opposed to nopage has a very consistent feel to how quickly pages open. Boot times are about the same once the super/pre-fetching has finished (this is on a QX6850) on my X6800 Vista feels much quicker still than the quad with nopage and the boot time is approx 10 secs quicker even with a slower HD!
Click to expand...

How can boot time be affected by the page file? The page file only gets initialized in the late stages of the boot process. And none of the pages in memory are "old enough" or "access infrequently enough" at that point in time for them to be paged out unless memory is low. But booting Windows doesn't take 4GB so that still doesn't explain where these 10 seconds of quicker boot time are coming from...
 
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