We have two computers, exact same models but different software and hardware setups. One is for call quality monitoring, the other for retail (has 768 MB RAM, the monitoring computer has 512). The main noticable symptom is that when the users of either computer try to shut their systems down, it hangs for roughly 5 minutes. The retail computer also gets a warning when editing an Excel spreadsheet stating that the operation she's about to do could take up to a minute to perform. Before I added an extra 256 MB of RAM to the retail computer, this operation took about a minute to perform and in that time, Excel stopped responding. After the RAM boost, it was almost instant. When I set their pagefiles to system-managed as opposed to a fixed size, these symptoms seemed to go away. However, they returned after a few days. The pagefile configuration has not been altered (the users don't have any administrative access). Also, neither of these machines have had BSOD's while I've been working here, and the problems arose after I started. I'm quite certain the issue is memory related, and more than likely not related to the physical memory in these computers due to the nature of the problems at hand. I'm curious as to whether or not this points to a corrupted pagefile or if it might be something else? No break or I kill you!

Is there a second partition where you can set the pagefile rather than on C:\? "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown

If the performance changed with a pagefile change then you should add more physical memory (RAM). If your hard drive is fairly full the page file will not be very large. Look at the remaining space on the drive. edit BTW, the page file is a temporary storage spot on the hard drive. The data is normally purged after the operation has completed. So the page file should not be corrupted. You may want to check your drive to see if it needs to be de-fragged. Right click on My Computer and choose Manage> storage> disk de-fragmentation. Then choose analyze. That will tell you if the drive need to be de-fragged.

256 and 512 are TOO LITTLE ram. Minimum for xp imo is 1gig. When was the last time you ran chkdsk /r and then run disk cleanup and defragged the drives? highly recommend you do so and then set pagefile to min and max the same which would be 384 for the machine with 256 and 768 for the machine with 512. These should provide plenty of pagefile space and since static won't fragment which will kill pagefile performance. Seriously consider adding ram.

Thanks for your posts. Wanderer, you misread me. the retail machine has 768 MB, not 256. I added 256 to it. The performance changes came with the pagefile changes, not an increase in system memory. The increase in system memory has not solved the problem at all in the retail machine, which actually runs less intensive operations. As for a second partition, no, there isn't one. There's plenty of diskspace, though. No break or I kill you!

Sorry about the misread. Did you run chkdsk, disk cleanup and defrag?

I haven't tried those tools, no. Mostly because the time required to use them isn't available to me, but I'll see what I can do tonight. No break or I kill you!