A word of advice: Never disable the page file in Vista

[djspan101]

Never disable the page file in Vista!

I did this once and as soon as i would boot into vista it would throw up literally hundereds of errors but i definitely had no spyware or viruses!

So please re-consider before disabling your page file as it can completely screw up vista.

djspan101

 

[ChinoNYC]

You shouldn't disable the page file regardless of whichever Win OS you happen to be using.

 

[strategic]

Never disable the page file in Vista!

Yes, I agree. When Windows runs out of RAM, the pagefile is where it 'writes notes' to remember what it's doing...

 

[sw123]

The page file controls the usage of RAM in your system

without it the usage of RAM will skyrocket and cause errors

only ADVANCED users with GOOD REASON to disable the page file for DIAGNOSTIC reasons is a good job, it DOES NOT help your system performance as some rumors have it

 

[red1776]

to page or not to page

This has been something that has interested me for quite some time because the 'experts' cant agree weather the page file is an antiquated relic from the days when 32Mb's was a lot of ram, or of vital importance to the system function. i have shut down the page file on several of my computers and watched the results( i would not recommend this to others however, i was willing to assume the possible risk). on one system, an XP/ socket 939/DDR/ nforce3 chipset/ system with 4gb of ram (3gb available due to 32 bit OS) i noticed a rather dramatic, marked improvement in performance even when playing crysis for hours, and in six months never had any problems at all. right up to my current system,
an Vista/AM3/DDR21066/790fx chipset/64 bit OS with 8gb of ram. I did not have any performance increase, but still had no problems with errors or using up all of the memory like Dj seems to have had. it appears that XP and vista both do an admiral job of returning ram to the system, or turning off the page file forces it to do so. again, just my little experiment, not advocating it to anyone.

 

[strategic]

This has been something that has interested me for quite some time because the 'experts' cant agree weather the page file is an antiquated relic from the days when 32Mb's was a lot of ram, or of vital importance to the system function. .

In my opinion, it all depends what the system is used for. For example, (and it depends on the game I guess) I don't think many games out there would depend on a pagefile, but if you're running CAD-CAM software, your system is going to take all the resources it has (at least that's what I am led to beleive when I watch my task manager-or now 'process manager')...

 

[djspan101]

The reason I disabled it in the first place was because I was following a tut I found on google on how to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu without loosing vista. It told me to go into disk management and shrink the C so there was space for Linux, however it didnt work. It told me if that didn't work i had to disable several things such as Error Logging, System Restore and the vista page file. It was a real pain because I was on holiday but luckily my dell studio laptop had a factory image restore built in so I didn't need the vista disk

 

[SNGX1275]

I have not done it in Vista. But I have disabled it in XP, in fact I've ran XP with the pagefile disabled more than I've ran it enabled, I think I remember hearing the OS still has something like it even when its disabled but outside of just trusting it I don't have any proof. Back when XP came out it ran pretty well on 128Megs of RAM, so having 1GB was enough to turn off the pagefile without any ill effects, but now with all the extra "bloat" that has occurred with 3 service packs I wouldn't recommend it with anything less than 3GB.

I wouldn't expect it to be a problem in Vista provided you have enough physical RAM. How much do you have? Is it the same computer in your specs with 1GB? If so then yes, I can see how Vista might throw a fit. I would say you need at least 3 and probably 4+ (so doing it on 32bit Vista may never be wise without having a vlite or otherwise tweaked install).

 

[djspan101]

it is my laptop which is vista home premium and has 1GB physical RAM. I want to upgrade but as the laptop is pretty new the SO DIMM PC-6400 is quite expensive. I may start a new thread but can anyone tell me how much I could get that for?

thanks,

djspan101

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I haven't had pagefiles in years. I didn't need one when I had 4 GB of RAM and I don't need one now with 12 GB.

I think djspan101's problems aren't related to pagefile but some other changes ("i had to disable several things").