Shel said:
Win XP SP2 with 1GB RAM created a 1533 MB paging file on my C drive.
I am considering replacing that paging file with a 4 GB paging file on
another partition (G). Will this help or hurt performance?
It almost certainly won't help. Putting the Page File on a second partition
is not a good idea, and can hurt your performance. What it does is move the
page file to a location on the hard drive distant from the other
frequently-used data on the drive. The result is that every time Windows
needs to use the page file, the time to get to it and back from it is
increased.
Putting the page file on a second *physical* drive is a good idea, since it
decreases head movement, but not to a second partition on a single drive. A
good rule of thumb is that the page file should be on the most-used
partition of the least-used physical drive. For almost everyone with a
single drive, that's C:.
And with a1GB of RAM, 1533MB i salready much more than you probably need.
4GB is way more than you probably need. The page file substitures for RAM,
whe there isn't enough RAM. The more RAM you have, the *less* page file you
need.
However, since you have 1GB of RAM, unless you run particularly
memory-hungry applications, you probably use the page file hardly at all,
and whatever you do it won't affect performance.
