Just curious if I have enough memory to disable the pagefile without causing any harm??
I have no idea how this happened! It's an older laptop that hasn't been booted in a year or so. It really has 8 GB of system memory, but apparently, Windows 7 forgot the decimal. That was my laugh for the day.
Last edited by DeaconFrost; 20 Jul 2016 at 14:19.
No wonder system rating is not available, it's all confused!Just curious if I have enough memory to disable the pagefile without causing any harm??
I have no idea how this happened! It's an older laptop that hasn't been booted in a year or so. It really has 8 GB of system memory, but apparently, Windows 7 forgot the comma. That was my laugh for the day.
Hi,
While it probably won't cause any harm I generally feel W1 works better with the page file enabled regardless of the amount of RAM installed.Just curious if I have enough memory to disable the pagefile without causing any harm??
Cheers,
Real, as in the screenshot wasn't altered in any way. System properties legitimately said it had 800 GB of memory. I've never come across that before. The system actually has 8 GB of memory.
You could probably disable the pagefile without ill effects. But that doesn't make it a good idea.
There is a great deal of confusion and misinformation on the Internet regarding the pagefile. Much of the confusion is based on the statement in the pagefile configuration dialog:
"A paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM."
While not entirely incorrect it isn't a very accurate accurate description either. Unfortunately that description is often taken far too literally, sometimes to ridiculous lengths.
The pagefile is often thought of as some kind of overflow area used when RAM runs short. There is also the widespread idea that Windows is rather stupid in it's use of the pagefile and it's size must be carefully controlled or it will be used too much. None of that is true.
At any given time there is likely a lot of memory used to store that hasn't been accessed for a long time and in fact may never be used again. Windows knows about this is considerable detail. It is a crime against performance to use high performance RAM to store what is essentially static data. The pagefile provides a place where Windows can offload this static data and making more available for more important purposes. Note that this is a highly simplified description of a very complex process with many optimizations.
The bottom line is that the pagefile will usually improve performance. Of course if you have a lot of RAM and a light workload that may not be noticeable. But except for some very unusual situations (none I can think of off hand) having a pagefile will not hurt performance.
It's very possible that Notebook has 8GB or is showing 8.00GB but the decimal point is not visible. I have an E6410 and 8GB is its maximum.
As for the various opinions seen about the Virtual Memory/paging file, the written recommendation in the last few versions of Windows, by Microsoft in Help and Support, has been for 1.5 times the physical RAM unless needing more for large processes [such as video editing, large spreadsheets, large databases, etc]. What works for some may not work for others, I do mine on 2 HDDs, 2GB on the C: or boot/system drive and the larger portion on the D: drive, has always given me noticeable performance improvement. With 8GB RAM C: gets 2GB and D: gets 10-12GB. I like smaller internal HDDs such as C: at 250GB and D: at 500GB depending upon what I have on hand plus a couple of 2TB NAS drives.
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