Win 7 32bit page file question

[opethdisciple]

Q.

Obviously Windows does a good job of managing the page file it's self. 95% of the Pc's we have in the office are Win 7 32bit and they have no problem.

We do have the odd machines which come with Win 8 x64 (8Gb of Ram) which we then downgrade to Win 7 32bit.

There is one machine in particular which seems to have a consistent issue.

Basically with just a few applications open we are seeing the entire 2.4gb of system ram get used up.

now the other machines in the company also running Win 7 32b only have 4gb of physical memory installed but they generally don't exhibit the same issues.

I'm wondering if Win does something different with the page file when it sees 8gb of physical ram despite the fact it's running a 32bit OS?

Cant upgrade it to Win 7 64bit as manager doesn't want that.

So whats the optimum amount of page file I should set?

 

[ED209]

Does windows manage the page file?

Windows 7 32 bit can only see\use a max of 4GB of ram even though 8GB is installed.

my PC has 8GB of ram and the page file has a total size of 8115MB and this is managed by windows.

 

[Rroff]

Open task manage and go to the performance tab at the bottom click on resource monitor - check how big the hardware reserve slice is - on most systems it should be around 100MB or so but for some reason some systems will eat 1-2GB for that :S

In fact screenshot the resource monitor window showing physical memory deployment on one of the problem PCs if you can as that could help people here diagnose it possibly.

EDIT: Regarding pagefile settings - if you are going to set it manually then I recommend setting 1024MB initial size (as this lets Windows function properly) and then set maximum size depending on your workload - for most people 8192MB should be more than sufficient but if you spend a lot of time with multiple heavy weight programs or working with some really high end stuff you might need to increase it.