Hi. I have been looking thorught all diffrent post about xp's pagefile and whether to move it or not, whether to get rid of it or not, or just to leave it, or to move it to differnt partition. Many people have been saying yes and some no some people say make it 499-500 and it makes some kind of difference in speed (less defragmentation?. What i would like to know is 1) Should i keep a pagefile. 2) If yes then should it be on another partition? 3)If yes how can i find out which is my fastest drive to put it on there? 4)Is there any danger in doing this (eg system unstability?)

HOW TO: Set Performance Options in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308417

Also: How to Configure Paging Files for Optimization and Recovery in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314482

I'll take a stab at your question: What's your normal memory usage for your daily computing activities? (Open Task Manager [Ctrl+Shift+Esc], and look at the performance tab.) 1) Unless you do AutoCad with huge graphic files or the like, I recommend DISABLING your paging file. 2) N/A but: it is better to have the pagefile on the non-booting partition. 3) N/A but: Check manufacturer specs for rotation speed (7200 RPM > 5400 RPM), cache memory (8MB > 2MB), and the like. Disk format (FAT32 or NTFS) might also matter. 4) Trying should not hurt you sysem :-) I've run XP since it came out and have 348 MB RAM and no pagefile. Hope this helps

1) Should i keep a pagefile. Most people say windows was designed to use a page file, and thus recommend to keep it on. I've removed it, and I haven't any problems what-so-ever. What you probably don't know is that Windows has an internal page file already. The page file you're talking about is the external one, which is used when the internal one is filled. 2) If yes then should it be on another partition? No, putting it on a different partition won't help any (actually, it will decrease performance). Your c: is usually on the outer edge of the disk, so having your page file on the outer edge (ie: lower lettered drive) improves performance. If you want to improve performance, put it on a different hard drive, not partition. If it's just another partition, your computer will still have to swap/multitask in order to use the page file. if you put it on a different hard drive, it can access the page file on one hard drive, while it accesses the data (ie: OS) on the other hard drive. 3)If yes how can i find out which is my fastest drive to put it on there? if you read above, it's your c:...the one along the outer edge of the hard drive platter... 4)Is there any danger in doing this (eg system unstability?) no instability from moving the page file...only if you remove it (supposedly). I turned my page file on so that certain programs wouldn't complain whenever i run it (photo editing programs, etc). You should set the minimum and maximum values the same so the size won't change (to prevent fragmentation). Also, the value shouldn't be too large...the most I've set mine is 200MB.

I would like to know more about pagefile too.. I got 1gig ram ddr2100, xp1900, geforce3ti, and 40gig hdd... turn off my pagefile... now be getting slow performance.. My desktop icons are freshing itself back very slowly... My games doesn't want to load up anymore after the first time i played.. I thought maybe i have too many stuff... tested on a brand new built computer with my 1gig of ram... with geforce4 getting the same problem... so disable pagefile is a good idea or not to help performance?

My opinion... Run the programs you would normally run at any given time. Then take a look at how much free memory you have in the Task Manager. If you have plenty of memory free, no sense in having a page file. On my computer, for instance, I can open a bunch of IE windows, Word, Photoshop, play MP3's, etc, and render video at the same time and I have yet to see my computer drop below 135mb free. That's still 135mb of physical memory to go before a paging file is even needed. So I don't use one. No sense in having Windows use a paging file if there is still plenty of physical memory left to use. Just my $0.02 worth. -=Bryan=-