Does anyone know of a utility that will allow you to move the windows pagefile to the beginning of the drive. This would have to be done from some dort of boot disk because the beginning of the drive usually holds the OS files. I have been unsucsessful in finding a utility but if anyone knows of one let me know.

you should use a defragmenter tool like raxco perfect disk v4, wich allow a file placement - then define your file placement policy (right click on your pagefile disk in raxco left frame - edit partition - file placement) to move all your files at bottom disk... Then run a defrag, all your files will be at bottom... Then define a pagefile to zero (to erase your pagefile and prevent having it in multi parts), at next boot w2k will create a new 20meg pagefile and advise you to increase it, that you should spec to your needs. Then you redefine your file placement to your choice. Personnally I put frequently modified files at top (wich come after pagefile !) and occasionaly and rarely modified at bottom. In addition to this I use a separate partition for pagefile and temp files (defined in environment variables) hope it helps ps: let me know if you find a more othodoxal way or utility to do this

Please forgive an opinion but I think you guys are wasting lifespan. Back in the days of MFM drives and early ides [300 to 1200 rpms]it made sense to manipulate directory/file placement. but then OS's were less sophisticated also. Nowadays? How many milliseconds [1000th of a second] did you save? I'd bet a years worth wouldn't add up to the time spend manipulating file placement. Concerning putting a pagefile on its own partition: if its on the same drive its a complete waste of time and space. Disk io involves the drive read and writes. If pagefile operations are stacked [this is what the controller does] with system file operations [which is why MS recommends a different physical drive not drive letter ie partition] on the same drive, where on the drive that is read/written doesn't matter. Moral of the story is pagefile on a drive different then where winnt folder resides or leave it be.

Thanks for the suggestion chamanz, I will try out this raxco perfect you speak of. As far as your comments Wanderer, I commpletely disagree. If a pagefile is at the end of a disk, the disk head needs to span the entire disk back and forth when writing to the pagefile. At around 20ms for a full stroke oposed to 9 or 10ms average seek time, and dozens of reads a second this extra time adds up quick.

According to Microsoft, Wanderer is correct; chamanz's solution won't do much for optimizing the use of the pagefile. Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 197379: Configuring Page Files for Optimization and Recovery http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;197379 If you do a seach in either google or Microsoft's site, you'll find a number of articles that will recommend at the very least to put the pagefile on a seperate partition from the OS and for the best optimization, it should be placed on a seperate HD that is used only for the pagefile.

Let me make 1 correction/clarification. Chamanz is correct in that the pagefile should be defraged however, that by itself isn't going to do much as long as it's on the same drive as the OS. Increasing the amount of RAM will do considerably more to improve performance than defraging the pagefile.

I agree with Wanderer. Life's too short. Go outside and play for a while.