page file question (xp pro sp2)

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xp pro sp2, P4 3.0, 2 gig ram, 40 gig c: drive for system and programs only

Greetings all, I just added 1 gig of ram to my system (to make 2 gig), primarily because I have started to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for dictation and wanted it to have plenty of memory available. The voice recognition gurus I have found recommend a fixed size paging file, I guess so it stays in one place on the drive (I don’t know how such things work). I went along with windows recommendation of 3 gigs and set the min and max at that, though it seemed like a lot. Dragon works just fine.

To check on what I was using, I dictated into word for an hour, then opened and loaded files into half a dozen hefty apps, more than I typically use at once, and only reached about 700 mb of page file use. Am I correct in thinking that I don’t need a 3 gig page file?

Also, I noticed when I defragged the c: drive, that the gui in diskeeper made it look like the page file was in two locations on the drive, seemingly defeating the purpose of keeping it all together. My second question is, if I do keep the large size, can I get it in one contiguous place on the drive? Deleting and re-creating it perhaps?

Thanks Much, David

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You probably don’t need a 3GB pagefile. You could set the Minimum size to something like 2GB and leave the Maximum alone. That should be plenty of ‘reserve’. Just monitor it occasionally. If things are working well now why bother with trying to the pagefile in a contiguous place. Specifying a min and max the same size does not guarantee that you’ll get a contiguous file just that the size specified will be allocated all at once. No dynamic expansion will occur. You could certainly set the page file size to 0, re-boot and delete the file, set the size to what you want and re-boot again. But once again, why if things are working well?

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks Joe,
I will follow your advice and reduce the size to 2 gb and otherwise leave well enough alone. I have slowly learned to not fix too many things that aren’t broken on my computer!
David

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Your point about “the GUI indicating that the page file was in two locations on the disk” will be true only if you don’t have Hibernation turned on (and thus you don’t have HIBERFIL.SYS as a hidden/system file on your root directory). If Hibernation is on, this HIBERFIL.SYS will also show in the Defrag GUI as an immovable green area, proportional to the size of your system memory (viz. 2 GB).

One way to confirm whether your Pagefile is fragmented is to do DEFRAG C: -v in a Command Prompt window, and look for the lines similar to
Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 3 GB
Total fragments = n (preferably 1…)
(of course this takes as long as a GUI defragment, but there is no progress information!).

John

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Thanks for the info John, I was looking at the gui in Diskeeper 9, I am thinking you are referring to the windows defrag utility in your post. In any event, I have hibernation off and no HIBERFIL.SYS. Diskeeper reports the page file in 2 fragments.

Brings up another question though, the diskeeper gui shows a large area that is green striped and marked as “reserved system space” on my data (non-system) d: drive. The c: drive has a very small area marked with this green striping. Anyone know what it refers to?

Edit- I have answered my own question, diskeeper says- “Green-striped areas (on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems only) show space on the volume reserved for expansion of the Master File Table.”

Thanks, David

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This space is actually reallocated for the use of data files if you manage to fill up the rest of the disk. My external hard disk used for backups on a daily basis has been eating into this ‘reserved space’, which was released in a big chunk shortly before the disk would otherwise have filled. (I’m just letting it carry on to see what happens!)

John

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