Murmur said:
If I disable pagefile, do I risk only "out of memory" messages or similar?
Or do I risk disk corruption, possibly future reinstallation of o.s., etc?
Thank you!
The biggest risk is that you will reduce the overall performance of
your computer because Windows will now be forced to allocate physical
RAM to the unused portions of memory allocation requests.
All items (application programs, device drivers, Windows components)
ask for memory allocations that are larger that what they actually
need under normal circumstance. By design, Windows must allocate
memory address space for all of the requested memory. Under normal
circumstances Windows allocates physical RAM addresses only to those
portions of the requests that are actually used, and maps the unused
portions to locations in the page file.
Note that the mapping of unused memory requests to the page file does
not require any actual disk activity. All that is needed is to make
entries in the memory mapping tables maintained by the CPU.
However if the page file has been disabled (and also if the total
mappings to the page file exceed the maximum size limit) then Windows
is forced to use physical RAM for these unused portions, thereby
rendering that RAM unusable for other purposes such as disk cache.
Here is a practical example. My computer has 768 mb of RAM. I have 5
applications running on the taskbar, plus antivirus, antispyware, etc.
At present there is a total of 324 mb of RAM that has been requested
but not used, and which is mapped to the page file. If I were to
disable the page file then there would be 321 mb of RAM tied up by
these unused portions of memory requests.
Note:
To determine the figure for the unused portions of memory allocation
requests you need to determine the total page file usage from Windows
Task Manager on the Performance tab - PF Usage. Then subtract from
that the amount of active memory content that is in the page file, as
reported by MVP Bill James' Page File Usage Monitor which you can
download (free) from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/
The data from my machine was 358 mb PF Usage from Task Manager and 34
mb of actual data in the page file from Bill's utility.
Hope this explains the situation.
Good luck
Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm