XP Home made a huge custom pagefie on my C drive

[me]

When I installed windows n my HP notebook Windows mae a custom pagefile
that is 1440 mn aand 2880 max. I have 1 gig of ram on the system.

Shuld I leave the pagefile as custom r let widows manage it? I have heard
pros and cons of both. I want the best performance so please give me
a recommendation, thank you.

 

[Steve]

It is always best to predefine manually your pagefile
size. If you do not then if and when the system needs
more pagefile area it will allocate more space on the
hard drive. The downside to that is now the pagefile
becomes fragmented and the defrag tool cannot fix this
problem. It does not cause the system to crash just
begin to run much slower than you would expect. My
suggestion is to first make sure you have defraged the
drive at least three times in a row, YES you heard me
right.... Then go to virtual memory properties and make
the pagefile min and max the same number which should be
at least 3 times the amount of memory.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

When I installed windows n my HP notebook Windows mae a custom
pagefile that is 1440 mn aand 2880 max. I have 1 gig of ram on the
system.

Shuld I leave the pagefile as custom r let widows manage it? I have
heard pros and cons of both. I want the best performance so please
give me
a recommendation, thank you.

Almost certainly, the minimum is far more than you need. 1440MB
is much more than most people with 256-512MB need; for you with
1GB of RAM, it's way overkill. I would change it to around 200MB,
but leave the maximum high, so it can expand as necessary in the
unlikely event that you ever need that much.

For more information, read http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm
by MVP Alex Nichol.