Need desperate PAGEFILE ADVISE PLEASE

[me]

I have an HP notebook with a 3.2 P$ with hyerthreading technology and
witndows home sets the pagefile at custom, 1536 min, 3072 max and i have
a total of 1.5 gigs of ram. Should i leave these figures or let windows
manage the pagefile? I want the best performance. Your advise would be
greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

[Guest]

you should set it with the formula

pagefile = 1.5* ra

example: if you have 128mb of ram the pagefile should be 128*1.5=19

and you should make this size fixed. it prevents pagefile from fragmentation

 

[Fuzzy Logic]

I have an HP notebook with a 3.2 P$ with hyerthreading technology and
witndows home sets the pagefile at custom, 1536 min, 3072 max and i have
a total of 1.5 gigs of ram. Should i leave these figures or let windows
manage the pagefile? I want the best performance. Your advise would be
greatly appreciated, thank you.

It's impossible to make recommendations for size as it will depend entirely
on your system and the software you run. The general rule of thumb is to let
Windows manage it. You MAY gain a slight performance increase by using
custom settings but what those values would be can only be determined by
monitoring usage on your system.

 

[dglock]

i really doubt you have that much ram in a laptop! better
recheck that figure.
don

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have an HP notebook with a 3.2 P$ with hyerthreading technology and
witndows home sets the pagefile at custom, 1536 min, 3072 max and i have
a total of 1.5 gigs of ram. Should i leave these figures or let windows
manage the pagefile?

While they will do no actual harm, those settings are tying up a great
deal of disk space to no purpose. With that much RAM it is very
unlikely that there is any actual traffic at all to the page file
(though the system tends to park 20 or 30 MB there in a precautionary
way). I suggest an initial size of 100 and leave the Max high - though
1000 max should be adequate there is no downside to having it higher.
Read up the background at my page www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Alex Nichol]

ou should set it with the formula:

Not sensible advice in any version of windows and certainly not in XP.
It is an old rule of thumb which was (I think) developed for multi-user
Unix, where it does make some sense, and brought over and parroted
without thinking. Unfortunately the System default settings do not seem
to have had thought applied

 

[Fuzzy Logic]

you should set it with the formula:

pagefile = 1.5* ram

example: if you have 128mb of ram the pagefile should be 128*1.5=192

and you should make this size fixed. it prevents pagefile from
fragmentation

Totally wrong. This is a rule of thumb from the early days of computing when
64MB was a LOT of RAM. In actual fact the more RAM you have the less
pagefile should be required. The is no hard and fast rules and what is
required can only be determind by monitoring your system under load (running
the software YOU run). Try using System Monitor or look at programs such as
FreeMeter <http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/> or Cacheman
<http://www.outertech.com/index.php?_charisma_page=products>

Note that you will gain very little by overriding the default Windows
settings (letting Windows manage the file).