I only have 4 gigs memory. Dell says I can only upgrade to 6 gigs but Crucial says 2 banks of 4 gigs is okay. MS recommends my page file to be set at 1394 megs. I've read that 2 x memory total is a number to shoot at. That would be around 8 gig page file. Space is not a problem. (around 840 gigs free) Will setting page file to 8 gigs be okay? Will it affect computer's performance?
"Dell says I can only upgrade to 6 gigs but Crucial says 2 banks of 4 gigs is okay"
That Dell comment implies there is one soldered in 2 GB module, and one 2 GB is in a socket.
So the only easy route is 4 GB in the socketed one, a total of 6 GB.
The manual for those models says there are 2 sockets thus a max of 2 x 4 GB.
The only certain way is to take a look at the internals of the Laptop/AIO.
Crucial usually say this in the detail, they can get it wrong however.
Page file, on mine with 8 GB of RAM that is currently Allocated 1280 MB, Recommended 1909. I would just leave that as MS/System managed, you won't do better by manually increasing the maximum.
Many years ago that was nominally 1.5 x RAM memory, however things have obviously changed.
Thanks for the reply, Edwin. This may be stupid, but doesn't page file represent a part the c drive that your computer uses as virtual memory? I think I'll give it a try to increase my page file to twice the MS recommended amount and see what happens.
Thanks Helmut. Maybe I'll just leave it as is. Regarding the memory, speccy says there is a 4 gig stick in slot 1. And slot 2 is empty. I guess the 'soldered in' is confusing me.
Yes, same thing different name, however that additional RAM memory is slower be it an HDD or SSD.
If an application requires to use more RAM memory then Windows will allocate that automatically, or the application will use a swop file of whatever size is required on the HDD/SSD.
All different names for what is the same function. You have oodles of spare HDD/SSD space, no worries.
Unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise you should set the pagefile to system managed. It is highly doubtful you will do any better than that. Contrary to advise you may have read somewhere, this is not inefficient. It originated with people making guesses about how things work but lacking any real knowledge. Over the years there have been many guidelines such as setting the pagefile to 1.5 x RAM size. These were published for different operating systems operating under different situations and have little relevance today.
Most attempts at optimizing the pagefile are a waste of time. There is no magic value or formula that will give an optimum size. If there was it would be set by default.
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