What is pagefile.sys and can I move it?

You mentioned that system managed size is appropriate. I set mine manually to 3gb because it seems to mee that the dynamic allocation of page file size could cause an occasional slowdown. Is this true or does dynamic allocation not slow things down?

If dynamic allocation happens at all it's extremely infrequent and only if actually needed. You'll note my pagefile.sys was set to my memory size (8gig). And yet my machine has NEVER needed to use any appreciable amount of VM. Let the system manage it - it's actually pretty good about it.

04-Jul-2010

How do I know if my (D) drive is an actual separate drive or just partitioned from the C Drive? It says "Factory Image" and only has 1.54 GB free of 11.2 GB. If it is a 2nd drive, would the size be adequate if I moved pagefile.sys to that drive?. Thanks

Fire up the disk manager (Right click on My Computer, click Manage and then click on Disk Mangement). It'll show you which partitions live on which physical drives.

07-Jul-2010

I tried moving the paging file on my computer, I have windows vista home premium sp 2. it didn't work the way it works for windows 7. When I restarted my computer and checked to see if it worked it showed none for all drives instead of "managed system" on the external drive I selected.

External Drive? Don't do that. It'll just slow down your system. I'll bet that Windows simply prevented that from happening. (My guess is that at boot time it tries to set up the page file before external drives have been detected.)

07-Jul-2010

It works fine in XP with SP3 however, the display is slightly different than Win7; instead of "managed system" it displays the "Page file size" i.e. the amount of MBs you want, which in my case is the maximum 3070mb by clicking/using the "Custom Size" option.

I have two 300Gb hard drives set in a striped raid array and partitioned C - F so is there any point moving the swap file to F as it's not really on another hard drive?

Nope.

07-Jul-2010

I tried this on my Win 7 (64 bit).
The page file did show up on my secondary internal drive, along with a duplicate (the other being on my Desktop) Recycle bin.
However,after the reboot I got an error- that my system created a temporary paging file on the C drive.

Any suggestions?

Just an extra note, you can look up the speed of each internal drive you have. If your C drive is faster, keep it on the C drive. If your other internal drive is faster, of course you would want to use that one. Also, it is good to set up Windows to clear the paging file when it shuts down, but that is another discussion entirely that perhaps could be the making of another article here. Also, if you have a lot of RAM and a good processor, turning the paging file off is your best option option. DO NOT turn off the paging file on an older computer with very little RAM or slower processor. Also, decreasing the paging file on an older or slower computer may force Windows to increase the paging file when you reboot, and that means you will be staring at a screen for a very long time before you get into Windows again. That is because when Windows has to increase the paging file itself it takes its sweet time.

I have two page files, on different disks, C and G.
I want Windows (XP Home) to prefer the file on G:, i.e. to use the file on C: only if the file on G: fills up.
Is there a way to tell Windows which file to prefer?

@Robert

Been reading about this more and found this on Microsoft's site:

The optimal solution is to create one paging file that is stored on the boot partition, and then create one paging file on another partition that is less frequently accessed on a different physical hard disk if a different physical hard disk is available. Additionally, it is optimal to create the second paging file so that it exists on its own partition, with no data or operating-system-specific files. By design, Windows uses the paging file on the less frequently accessed partition over the paging file on the more heavily accessed boot partition. An internal algorithm is used to determine which paging file to use for virtual memory management.

Great technique for improving performance. For XP users like me, the clicks to do this are: Start;control panel;system;advanced;performance settings;advanced; and from there the rest is described in the article. I do a lot of photo manipulation on large images which are usually saved as bitmap (bmp) files, and frequently get windows messages saying that I do not have enough virtual memory. Well, I got enough now! Thanks, Leo!