System maintenance, any tips?

Is clearing on shutdown a good thing? Is there anything on virtual memory i might want?

Is clearing the virtual memory on shutdown a good thing? is there anything on there i might want?



oops thought the first one hadn't posted

On a laptop where there is a risk of it getting lost or stolen, it would be beneficial,
but on a desktop you have physical security (ie the locks on your doors), so it's
as waste of time and effort (imo).

There is no such thing as a wast of my time lol,

ill ask again

Is clearing the virtual memory on shutdown a good thing? is there anything on there i might want?

Is there anything i want to be carried over? Will i lose data by clearing virtual memory?

No
No

There you go!
I can expand on this, but that's the best answer

Ok jolly good, that just leaves one question, Is it better to defagment the virtual memory or clear it completely, obviously clearing it will save me time.

But are you sure there is ABSOLUTELY no advantage to keeping it? i would be in rather allot of trouble if i broke the family computer lol

No, it's best to go with LookinAround's suggestion
Make the Pagefile Min and Max equal the same.

The 1.5 (to 2) x Installed Ram (for Min and Max) has changed a bit in MS original statement on this.
ie if you have 512Meg of Ram 768Meg of Pagefile would be ideal.
But if you had 4Gig of Ram, 6Gig (or more!) of PageFile would be too big.

So what to do...

Well you can put in a value like 1.5Gig (Min and Max) then check if your system works well, and basically play around with it (ie a bit more, or a bit less)
There was a good thread I posted stacks of info on what to give your Pagefile (specifically) it was more around the 800Meg area (for large amounts of installed Ram) But my Posts were removed (this was an old thread I'm talking about)

Anyway, it's a matter of playing around until you get it right to your Hardware, and running software requirements

one can make work out of anything. LOO.

VM is in the pagefile.sys and is unreadable by normal means. This is where the
memory pages get written and read when there's not enough real RAM to perform
all the tasks at the same time.

Q.E.D. the space is useless to the user and only when the system gets stolen
would anyone attempt to go 'dumpster diving' to retrieve passwords.

Defrag of the pagefile.sys is very useful but needs to be performed very infrequently.

see this post

Put it this way
When Ghost (an imaging backup program) images (um backups!) the drive from using the Ghost boot up proceedure, it doesn't backup the Pagefile.

So the Pagefile can be even removed fully without any consequences ie it just re-establishes a new one (as per your Min/Max settings) on next startup

By the way I'm not suggesting you make Min and Max zero Meg (as some programs may not work) actually the absolute Minimum should be 50Meg

so, to expand on other's expanding

1. Clear the pagefile helps if you're concerned with the security risk (like someone stealing your laptop and trying see what was left behind in the pagefile). I don't believe there's any other pro or con for clearing it.

2, Clearing just overwrites the data in it so no one else could later read it. Clearing doesn't do any defragging . And, since your computer is constantly swapping info from memory to/from the pagefile (which is basically just a disk file) think of the impact if this one file is fragmented (and maybe badly fragmented) vs. being one contiguous block of data for the file (making it easier/faster for the disk to do all those read/writes to it)

3. About the only way to have a large pagefile in one contiguous space (vs. 2 or more non-contigous spaces) is to create it with maximum size at installation time (where you set min = max = the max value you figure you;d need)

4. If the pagefile is ever re-allocated (e.g to make it larger such as if you set min to a small number and let windows grow it over time as needed) then you should run PageDefrag (which, by the way, lets you know how many fragments in pagefile before and after)

5. Finally, i'd suggest the historical reason for min and max and growing the page file was, once upon a time (i'll say seeing as how you're 14 you wouldn't know that time!!) one only had small disk sizes and didn't want to give up all that pagefile space needlessly when you did your install. So windows just grew it as needed. These days you start with at least 80-160MB disks so should one really care if they commit 1 - 4GB of that to their pagefile, just in case?

Actually, 'Clearing' is a wipe - there are no fragments to defrag - they are 0's or 1's completely. No data. Nada!

If you would like to get your head into this, read here:

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

No that was the old days

These days you start with at least 80-160GB

Probably just a typo I suspect

Whoa I did not know there was soo much to maintaining..... Thanks for the info guys... Just got a new laptop n wanted to keep it in good condition... This helps alot!!! Good work guys

Thanks again

oops!

I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. (btw i know and often use/refer to the petri site. fyi to thread readers. it's quite good!)

The page file, like other files, has a "logical" size. But, in fact, that logical size is created by allocating the required clusters (which are fixed size) to give you your logical size. so if a disk cluster size of 4K and a windows 10K filesize, requires windows allocate 3 clusters.

When you clear the page file it overwrites the data in the file (which is really overwriting the clusters making up the file) but that has nothing to do with whether those clusters are physically adjacent to one another or scattered around your disk (which is the defrag issue)

Quote:
Actually, 'Clearing' is a wipe - there are no fragments to defrag - they are 0's or 1's completely. No data. Nada!

No you miss understood
Wiping usually means wiping the free space on the file as well, therefore defragging it (indirectly)

ok.

well, what can i say other then, uhhhh, thanks for clearing that up!!!

but, in fact, that fact puts a whole new twist on the defrag topic.

Don't confuse clearing with defrag functionality. Clearing is intended to wipe clear your data for safety. If in fact you delete your pagefile as part of the process it;s not known when it;'s recreated if you could then be WORSE off from a defrag standpoint.

Consider one contiguous 4GB pagefile that your carefully created years ago during an install. Now you've cleared and deleted it. Does anyone know if you can guarantee that 4GB contigous clusters are or can be reassigned to the pagefile next startup?

/*** Edit ***/
Actually, i should say "every" startup since you're always deleting and running that risk with "every" shutdown

ok ill just go with a defrag, ive down loaded that defrag thing , can i just confirm, its called pagedfrg and the icon looks like bits of a rubix cube are floating away. Is that the right 1? i got it from you're link earlier

PageDefrag v2.32
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx
Direct Download:

Ok ive run it, it only took about 2 seconds and i read the top 1 and it said "already in 1 ????"

Cant remember the last word sorry

Already in 1 fragment, means it cannot defrag any more
ie 2 or more Fragments can become 1, and that's the limit !

1 whole contiguous file

contiguous file Definition: A file on disk that is not broken apart. All sectors are adjacent to each other. A contiguous file is faster to read and write than one that is fragmented