I have an enormous (12GB, soon to be 24GB) amount of memory, surely using the page file is pointless? So why is Vista doing it? For example, having recently rebooted, I've got 7GB of memory free (not even used for cache), but 5GB of page file! Why not keep that 5GB in RAM for now? RAM is MUCH faster than hard disk!

I decided to try turning off the page file. Nothing happened. I put it to the minimum it would take (16MB) and it did nothing, it just keeps using slightly more than the amount of memory used by applications. Why? (And yes I rebooted after changing the settings, even though it didn't prompt me to).

Originally Posted by MilesAhead

Why don't you try disabling paging altogether? I have an 8GB quad core and I run no swap. I have prefetch set to only cache boot files. On Windows Seven I use prefetch default settings with 1 GB min/max page file. Runs smooth even though that machine only has 2 GB memory. Windows Seven seems to insist of a page file to avoid memory notifications. But my Vista64 SP1 doesn't seem to care.

If you have no max set on the page file it will probably want to use it. Try setting min and max the same, or just disable paging.

I have tried both those, rebooting inbetween. It ignores me.

Originally Posted by MilesAhead

If you left Prefetch settings at default you may be better off to try setting both min and max to 1 gb. Vista is a little different but I noticed on Windows Seven if I made a 4 GB page file it wanted to use about 1 and a half GB. But if I set min and max to 1024 MB it was happy to use about 300 MB or less. Having free memory isn't that big a deal. If most of your memory is used as Standby that's ok as long as it dumps it when you need memory instead of giving an out of memory error.

Where is the prefetch setting?

Originally Posted by townsbg

I can not imagine needing 12 gig much less 24 unless you are using it as a server. Do you really need that much? Consider that and try tweaking your system like Miles said before spending more money. Just because it is using your pagefile does not really mean that you have a decrease in performance. That really depends upon what Windows is using it for.

I use about 9GB of that regularly. I use a lot of large applications.

Also, I'm actually making a profit of £10 by upgrading to 24GB. The used price of my 12GB is more than I just got 24GB for!

I tried going through it again carefully, pressing apply and OK everywhere. This time it actually asked me to reboot, which is hasn't done before, but it still didn't listen - it's using 8GB of pagefile, memory usage is 6.5GB, with 5.5GB cache. I'm assuming the Task Manager is correct!

I have tried min and max both 16MB (which is the minimum it will do), and also set it to "off". The settings stick ok, but in the task manager, it tells me it is paging several GB. Just checked the pagefile.sys file in c:\ and it's 16MB, so I have no idea what the task manager is reporting! I think I'll believe the size of the actual file....

I assume since I have plenty "cached" that this would also cache the kernel.

[Reads link]

EGAD! That's a lot of reading. It'll make my head explode.

I like this image though:
http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/m...ge_thumb_1.png

2 TB memory, 64 processors!