Page 1 of 1

Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 3:35 pm
by Philldoe
I bought a new laptop a couple weeks ago. I'm trying to squeeze as much as I can from this before I start making minor upgrades to it. For the most part it's perfect, even better that it was quite cheap compared to other laptops in it's class. This, however, came at a price. That price was a 5400RPM 1TB hard drive.

The 8GB of ram is plenty to keep the computer from hitting the page file very much while doing normal tasks, but I still set up Windows with a page file on an additional hard drive. This leads to my question...

Will removing the page file on the OS drive cause any complications? Can I have a page file ONLY on the additional hard drive?

To add to this topic I was given a 60GB PS3 drive, and I'm not sure if it's 5400RPM or 7200RPM. (Thanks a bunch Forge, the laptop it went in had an accident about a week after) I was planning on taking my old 64GB Corsair SSD out of my desktop and using it as the OS drive for the lappy, but I'm still unsure how much of a pain it would be to migrate Win8 from the stock HDD. The way MS sets up it's authentication is something I've not looked into very deeply yet.

Re: Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 3:47 pm
by maxxcool
Moving the page file to a second drive away from the OS is a good idea. It splits the I/o load *if* the device hits the page file.

onto pages files in general..

Windows vista and windows 7 cache lots of things into the page file on boot and for other things it unloads from local memory but 'wants to keep them close by'. so removing the page file would be a hit, but its arguably small. what you would see if anything will be odd application 'pauses' from time to time.

windows 8 comes out of the box with a much smaller page file... but mt limited experience prevents me from saying 'ya' or 'na' to no page file in win8...

cheers

Re: Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 3:53 pm
by Ryu Connor
You can choose to disable it fully on the primary drive without any real ill. I'd recommend leave a small enough pagefile to hold BSOD data. For a small memory dump that would be as little as 1MB. The rest of the pagefile can be on a secondary drive without any complaints from the OS.

Keep in mind if this is Win8 you're dealing with, it will eventually reduce the size of the pagefile as it collects commit usage data.

Migrating an install between disks is a pretty painless task.

Re: Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:16 pm
by Philldoe
Thanks for the quick replys. I'm not really concerned with the size of the page file as much as I am concerned with windows hitting the page file while in the middle of a game load or file copy task. Speed is what I'm after. I'm going to take your suggestion Ryu and leave about 10MB of page file on the OS drive, though I've never seen a BSOD on Vista or 7 so I doubt I'll see it with 8.

On to the OS migration, what are your suggestions? I was REALLY hoping for some form of physical media for re-installing windows when needed. I just want the base OS and Drivers, not a FULL backup of settings, programs, ect.

Re: Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:28 pm
by Flying Fox
Both 7 and 8 can be installed from USB sticks, get an 8 gig one, and you can have all the drivers and utilities that you want, plus the base OS. :)

Re: Page File Question

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:59 pm
by cphite
Philldoe wrote:
Thanks for the quick replys. I'm not really concerned with the size of the page file as much as I am concerned with windows hitting the page file while in the middle of a game load or file copy task. Speed is what I'm after. I'm going to take your suggestion Ryu and leave about 10MB of page file on the OS drive, though I've never seen a BSOD on Vista or 7 so I doubt I'll see it with 8.

On to the OS migration, what are your suggestions? I was REALLY hoping for some form of physical media for re-installing windows when needed. I just want the base OS and Drivers, not a FULL backup of settings, programs, ect.


You might also see a slight performance boost if, on your main pagefile, you set the minimum and maximum to the same number. That way you're never spending time growing or shrinking the page file.