Thinkpads Forum

Hi
Tweaking the settings on XP........
Any suggestions on the pagefile?
Not too sure if perpetually rewriting over the same pagefile spot on the SSD is going to do it any good. Googled it to no clear understanding. All results point to normal HDD's.
Regards
Stuart

the SSD will use its wear-leveling feature to prevent something from being written in the same table location.   you're better off letting windows set the page file and not worrying about your SSD.

I almost always set the page file to a set amount of space-about 1.5 times the amount of Ram. For example, if you have 2Gb of RAM, 3Gb for a page file is a good amount.

What this does is keep the page file from expanding or contracting, and most importantly, keeps the page file from becoming fragmented which in itself can cause the page file to be the source of slow downs.

The nice thing about a having page file on an SSD is that it can almost be as fast as regular RAM. However nothing beats having the maximum amount of RAM (3Gb for XP Pro or 4Gb or more for Vista). With prices for RAM at an all time low, why even have a page file on an already limited capacity drive where every precious gigabyte of space is needed for regular storage.

And yes, you can run Windows without a page file without any problems, but its not recommended if your physical RAM is low (less than 1Gb)

One thing I've done with my x300 is to turn off the pagefile altogether. this is something that can boost performance if you have enough physical RAM.

Windows will leverage the pagefile even if its not really needed. How do you know if its not needed? Bring up task-manager and see how much physical memory your concurrent processes are consuming.

If your peak usage is below your physical memory, the pagefile is a waste.

I'm running Vista (64) with 4GB of memory, and I've yet to hit any 'running low on memory' errors except for 2 instances of an app going crazy and trying to take up all memory available.