Whats the maxium paging file size i should set ? for XP ?

[Little TeaPot]

I want to set a Permenent one, as they say that gives better
performance.

10,20 gig ?, iam getting a new 160 SATA 7200 rpm drive and will set a
partition aside just for the paging file, so it can not get
fragmented.

Or should i just let XP decide the size, same question how big the
partition ?

Thanks.

 

[Star Fleet Admiral Q]

Well, if its just another partition on the same hard drive, you will
actually cause system degradation (bad performance) due to seek time for the
drive heads. So any time gained by preventing the page file from
fragmenting will be more than wasted with seek times. XP is very efficient
at managing the page file, set it to system maintained and forget about.
Performance can be gained if you have more that one physical hard drive,
where you can set a page file on both drives, both system managed - then the
system can decide to use one or the other, depending on whether the drive is
busy or idle.

 

[Ron Martell]

I want to set a Permenent one, as they say that gives better
performance.

"They" are totally wrong.

10,20 gig ?, iam getting a new 160 SATA 7200 rpm drive and will set a
partition aside just for the paging file, so it can not get
fragmented.

Page file fragmentation is right up there with Santa Claus and the
Easter Bunny - all hype and no substance.

Or should i just let XP decide the size, same question how big the
partition ?

Best performance will be had by letting Windows XP decide the size and
by having it on the same partition as Windows is installed in.

See MVP Alex Nichol's article on virtual memory management in Windows
XP at http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm


Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."