Paging File

[Dakota]

I am running Windows XP Home w/ 2.5 gig of ram.  Can't remember what would be a good size for the paging file.  Can anyone help me?

[Nightwing]

Since you have a significant amount of RAM. You might be able to function without one.

 I personally use a custom size of 2048 in both initial and max boxes. This should be more than enough for any amount. I have 3gb of RAM in my system for your reference. Hope this helps you.

If anything else you can set it to "System Managed".

[ChiefZeke]

You would also improve paging file operation by moving it to a second physical harddrive (if you have two or more drives).

[Nightwing]

You would also improve paging file operation by moving it to a second physical harddrive (if you have two or more drives). Wink

I agree. I forgot to mention that I do that very thing as well. Thanks Chief for pointing this out as well. 

[Dakota]

Don't have a second physical but have several partitions on this one.

[ChiefZeke]

Using a partition on the same physical drive won't enhance anything - the read/write heads just have to move to a different place on the same drive - no improvement.

[MilesAhead]

I am running Windows XP Home w/ 2.5 gig of ram.  Can't remember what would be a good size for the paging file.  Can anyone help me?

Depends on how much of a load you put on the machine.  I'm running an HP media center machine w 2 GB ram dual booting Vista Home Premium 32 bit and XP Pro. I have no swap on either.  OTOH I don't use office applications.. mostly small apps.  The only time I saw Vista give me the memory shortage dialog was when I had a bad video file.  I kept trying to view it in VLC media player and didn't realize about 1/2 dozen copies of VLC were orphaned in ram.  Killed the apps and the memory dialog never came back.

[Black Viper]

I have not used a page file (unless a particular application demanded it, namely a Microsoft game) for 10 years.

[Boomer]

Thank you for this post. BV this is one of those questions I was asking about a while back
in my memory post regarding the task manager. I have the same RAM as the poster,
so I will take it from there. Good stuff guys, thanks a lot!

Boomer

[Dakota]

Thanks everyone, I think for right now, I am going to try the 0 paging file and see how it goes.  If it is good, then it is good.  Thanks again one and all.