Delete Pagefile.sys?

[Paul Kaiser]

I have a cleaning program that can be set to delete the "swap file" at shutdown. I assume they're talking about the Pagefile, but I'm not sure.

Can "pagefile.sys" filen in the root (c:\) be deleted - or is it something that should not be touched?

Information will be greatly appreciated.

 

[WTC]

I have a cleaning program that can be set to delete the "swap file" at
shutdown. I assume they're talking about the Pagefile, but I'm not sure.

Can "pagefile.sys" filen in the root (c:\) be deleted - or is it something
that should not be touched?

Information will be greatly appreciated.



It can be deleted, but your computer will take longer to startup and/or
shutdown.

 

[Paul Kaiser]

Thanks for your reply - I was getting a bit confused about the whole thing!

Paul

 

[Guest]

You can delete pagefile.sys, but you can't do it when your pc is running with
the operating system it belongs to AFAIK.

If there's no pagefile.sys present at system startup, WinXP will create a
new one (it's used for storing memory data which is not in use at the moment
saving your pc some RAM space).

The term swapfile was used in the Win95, Win98 and Millenium operating
systems.

In general you should just leave it alone. If you don't have plenty of RAM,
the pagefile is used a lot, causing your system to slow down because it has
to read and write to and from the pagefile constantly. You can get an
impression of this by watching the outline in the task manager.

Lack of RAM will also mean that the pagefile has to be resized, and if it's
located on your C-drive it will probaly get fragmented which will slow down
your pc further.

The ideal thing to do with the pagefile is to put it on a hard disk which
isn't accessed by any other processes than Window's memory management. This
would give you the optimal performance concerning this specific issue.

A less drastic tweak is to change the pagefile's minimum and maximum size so
that thy are equal - in this way you ensure that the file never gets
fragmented (right-click 'My Computer' in Explorer, chose properties,
performance-settings, advanced, Virtual memory-change. And then you
defragment the concerned drive AND then run a tool like PageDefrag
afterwards(www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml).

Both tweaks has downsides, though.

But then again - unless you run a heavily loaded server or you're a super
tweak geek - you should just leave it alone.

I'm not sure if it's hundreds or thousands miliseconds you'll waste waiting
for your system to respond if you just leave the pagefile alone, but I know
for sure I won't waste time tweaking anything at all as long as my pc seems
to be working ok (and when the bottlenecks starts showing up I'll start
saving up money for a new, cheap pc instead of waste my time tweaking)

Cleaning up your pc isn't a waste of time, though