is it possible to change location of page file?

[whs]

just when i read brinks tutorial it stated moving it may yeild some
improvement of windows performance.

That is true in some cases. But you are not doing the type of work that will generate a lot of page faults.

 

[billybellfoot]

ok so it is true! just dosent apply to me.

thanks

 

[MilesAhead]

hi i only really run a browser sometimes as many as 5 tabs open (internet shopping) aside from that only programs really used are video player and emails but not all 3 at same time usually one at a time. oh and antifirus running thats it

Rather the putting the page file on another disk you can see a big improvement if you run portable programs from a separate drive. For example I have a couple of video encoding programs portable on my SSD that's in a USB 3.0 docking station. The encoder, source video and destination video are all on the SSD. Doesn't interfere with my system HD at all. Plus file copies from the SSD over the network are as fast as the destination HD can take them.

If you don't want to go SSD then you can gain similar advantage by using separate source and destination drives for disk intensive work.. such as video muxing.

But you could easily run portable browsers, email clients, editors off an external drive. That may take some of the load off the main HD. USB 2.0 it's not worth the effort. But eSata or USB 3.0 externals should work.

 

[MilesAhead]

btw if you want to have some fun playing around with Swap, try Linux. The swap options are much more versatile. You can have swap partitions on multiple drives as well as swap files. You can set the swapper to use a swap device as secondary when the primary is exhausted, or use round robin. It swaps to the devices in an endless loop. Also you can set it to only create a swap file if all other swap devices are full. Only using the slowest method when absolutely needed to keep running. There's much more room for experimentation.

I can tell you from doing Linux that all other things being equal, a swap partition is much faster than a page file. There is no file system. The partition space is allocated in chunks. When I was originally doing Linux my old 486 was so slow I could tell when I got a performance improvement or reduced disk thrashing just by watching and listening. Didn't really have to run benchmarks unless I wanted to know the burst rate on a HD.

 

[billybellfoot]

hi miles thanks for info/advice

however im not sure any of that apllies to my needs i dont have ssd or usb 3.0 i dont do video muxing? dont copy files over the network and dont use linux?

thanks

 

[MilesAhead]

hi miles thanks for info/advice

however im not sure any of that apllies to my needs i dont have ssd or usb 3.0 i dont do video muxing? dont copy files over the network and dont use linux?

thanks

If you draw the generalization from the concrete example then you might see it applies to any task not run on the same physical disk as the system disk. But since you seem to not want to expend any effort to do so I won't bother you with my observations. I don't like to do hand holding. One learns by doing is my motto. Not by getting everyone one else to figure out every step. But that's just how I learned.

 

[billybellfoot]

hi miles i agree with your motto. however we all need a little help from time to time.
some maybe more than others. admittedly

the point i was making was i dont do any of the stuff you mentioned just simple browsing and media
(watching movies etc) so didnt want to get more confused with the issue im having by learning stuff i dont or may never use.

my origional post was more to do with page file being moved to another location as in the tip in brinks tutorial (namely a usb flash) in my query.
i just felt the thread had got a bit off the beaten track with linux and swap partitions ssd's usb 3.0's etc

thanks for the help though like i said in post above it is appreciated

 

[Cytherian]

Is there any point of putting the paging file on a separate partition from the system? For example, you have the system installed on C: but also have a D: partition where you put user data, and then specify the paging file for D:. I suspect it may not make a difference at all, as there's only one read head on a conventional drive and you wouldn't see any performance difference on SSD.

 

[whs]

Is there any point of putting the paging file on a separate partition from the system? For example, you have the system installed on C: but also have a D: partition where you put user data, and then specify the paging file for D:. I suspect it may not make a difference at all, as there's only one read head on a conventional drive and you wouldn't see any performance difference on SSD.

That is absolutely correct. And if you have enough RAM (4GB or more), it makes no difference at all where your pagefile is located because it will be hardly ever used.

 

[townsbg]

The OP only has 2 gb which is the minimum that I would recommend for Vista so he could very well be using it some. However with a finely tuned system with the "light" computing that he does it probably not used that much. I think that we are all in agreement that for what he does moving the pagefile wouldn't help.