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Name: Nelson_Ecks
I just defragmented my c drive, to my surprise, the page file is not where it used to be. Is it normal for the page file to move, say from the 10th gb to the 20th gb, by itself? Has anyone else experience anything similar before?
Not sure about it moving by itself, but this has
info. about it works better if it is in its own partition.
How to Configure Paging Files for Optimization and Recovery in Windows XP
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First off that ms article is bogus. The author is mistaken saying partition when they meant spindle or drive. Disk i/o is not done by partition but by drive.
I have been working with MS products since dos 3.3 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.50.
Pagefiles don't move themselves. Period.
Not sure what you mean by "10gb to 20gb" but a pagefile occupies a static area of disk space.
If you have not set min and max to a set amount the pagefile can grow or contract depending on OS need. Perhaps this is your observation.
BTW you should really try setting the pagefile to NONE. With 512meg of ram you will find your performance much better.
I am posting from a machine that hasn't had one in 6 months. No crashes, way faster and my games love it.
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I emailed MS about that article months ago, and didn't get a response. What they suggest would result in the exact OPPOSITE of what is intended, if the partition is on the same drive.
If you followed the part that said to create TWO pagefiles on two partitions (but on the same drive), the second would hardly get used,as XP would find the first was accessed quicker.
I suggested they change the wording to "another partition on a different drive", but as I said 2 emails=no response.
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The page file is still 700 odd mb in size. In Diskeeper, 3 days ago, it is occupies some space in the 1st half the partition, then yesterday, it is shown to be occupying some space in the other half. It doesn't bother the performance of the system. I'm just curious on what exactly happened. I had this machine for some 16 months now, never changed any settings to do with page files. Thanks for the replies.
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Hey Rambler I sent them one a while back also and it is still there. I guess no one is home at MS? I will try my MVP channels and see if I can't get it dropped or changed.
Nelson have you actually looked at your pagefile settings? Reason I ask is I have found software utilities report false pagefile readings.
Like I said above I haven't been running with a pagefile. But Sandra and many other downloaded from the web system utilities I tried reported that I had one. No pagefile.sys on my drive though.
So I posted in a couple of forums on this just to get a consensus of opinion. After all was the OS lying when it said there was no pagefile? Everyone agreed if no pagefile.sys there is no pagefile. The utilites are doing false reporting. Not sure where they are getting their info from. I thought perhaps a false entry in the registry but could find nothing. Conclusion was to believe the OS and not the utilities.
Again pagefiles don't move themselves.
Try no pagefile with XP. You'll love it.
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page files size:
Min: 768 mb
Max: 1536 mbI don't use any page file utilities.
Something must have moved the page file. but what?
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XP or 2000 will sometimes recreate the pagefile on reboot if it thinks there's something wrong with it, and the disk allocation algorithms may decide it won't fit where it was stashed originally. These things happen.
Wanderer, I've been engaged in several forum discussions about what Task Manager, Sandra, AIDA32 and other monitors & reporting tools say about pagefile size, usage, etc. Few of them seem to agree or even report accurately what's there on the drive.
It's bad enough that few people understand what virtual storage is all about, what makes it worse is the apparent fictions that these tools throw up, adding confusion to ignorance. AIDA32 reports I've got EXACTLY double what my single fixed-size pagefile occupies. Task Manager is closest, total RAM + pagefile (commit-charge limit) is very close to the actual sum of the two, but not EXACTLY.
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That was my observation also! They would be close but not the same. Sure wish I knew what they were looking at to determine the figures they get.
Excellent point about the pagefile and the OS thinking something was wrong. That would do it.
I went to diskeepers site to see if they had anything to say about moving the pagefile during a defrag but all that I read said they didn't.
I am going to email my MVP contact and see what channels are available to get those misleading KB articles changed. I will post back if I get somewhere as a new thread.
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