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#41
This is a classic misunderstanding of what a pagefile is for. Most people seem to think it's used as an "overflow". When you need more memory than you have, then it "spills over" into your pagefile. While this does happen to some degree, a pagefile is used for much more than that.
In more modern OS's, the OS is smart enough to not put things in the pagefile it can get from other sources. For instance, if you load an app into memory, that app is already on disk. There is no need to write it to a pagefile a second time, so Windows simply discards memory and reloads it from the file already on disk when it pages out or in an application. This happens whether you have a pagefile or not, and is part of the entire virtual memory subsystem.
Modern OS's are also much smarter about how they use the pagefile. For instance, many kinds of applications have code which is run only once, and as such, if that app is in memory for a long time... there is no need to keep these "least used" pages in memory, since once they are executed, they just sit there using up memory that can be used for other things.
What the pagefile is used for is memory which can't just be discarded and reloaded. For instance, current application state, or data from a network, or just calculations made at runtime. Windows will write out data which it thinks is not used to free up memory for more important uses, such as disk and network caches, or to make more free memory available for on demand usage. So turning off the pagefile can actually reduce performance, because Windows will not make room for extra caches.
Hi there.
Windows kernel manages RAM much better these days -- even when you start an application the OS doesn't always load the whole thing into RAM. In fact to make the OS even more efficient it uses an algorithm (and it's exceedingly complex) on some sort of history so it can if details exist simply load up the parts of the application that the historical data remembers from previous uses.
That's why some people might notice that the first few times after installing a new OS it might seem to perform slightly slower than it does after 6 or 7 sessions where some useful historical data has been obtained.
So while say your computer is performing an application write to disk the CPU is obtaining what it thinks will be the next parts of an application it will need and if it's not in RAM already the OS will write details to the paging file.
Paging algorithms usually worked on LRU mechanisms (Least recently used) so those can be flushed when new data needs to be written to the page file.
Eliminating the page file can cause severe problems - even with plenty of RAM because the OS will still divvy up RAM into "page segments" and when it needs to "page" your application out it will resort to "swapping" - this is writing the ENTIRE application area out to a work area and takes a lot longer than paging. If you haven't got enough work area then the system will HALT.
Cheers
jimbo
I upgraded (by accident) from 7 to 10 a few days ago. I am definitely seeing lots of swapping making it very slow, task manager is frequently showing 100% disk activity*.
Tosh r830 laptop, i3 4G.
It might be because the C partition is nearly full (I keep data on a different partition), do you think it's worth resizing partitions?
While I am here, do you think it's worth doing a clean install and reinstalling the programs?
Thanks
* PS I quite like the new task manager
What is the size of the C drive and how much is empty there?
If you prefer to stay with windows 10, a clean install will be really good. I prefer a clean install over an upgrade.
I think all versions of Windows are unhappy on a partition which is nearly full.
You may find that a lot of space is taken up by "windows.old" which would normally be created by the upgrade process, and allows you to revert back to the earlier version of Windows for a month.
If you're happy with Windows 10, one option would be to take a backup (in case you later discover there's some file in Windows.old which you need) and then delete windows.old, which may free up enough space without resizing partitions.
A clean install is better, but I've had reasonably good experiences with upgrade installs so far.
Aha, so you got one of those sneaky updates? :)
If you're comfortable resizing, I'd go for that. I use external drives for my data as a "data safety" measure. For me, resizing isn't something I enter into lightly.
I would recommend a clean install because you've upgraded from Windows 7. So far, I haven't seen very many systems that actually work right when upgraded from Windows 7. You probably answered your question re a clean install with this statement: