Paging file

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titus12

Does WinXP Home need a 'paging file' if the system has 4GB of memory
installed? Sometimes I play the game Half-Life.

Thank you;
David
 
in message
Does WinXP Home need a 'paging file' if the system has 4GB of memory
installed? Sometimes I play the game Half-Life.
Click to expand...


See
news://news.microsoft.com/[email protected]

Games would try to minimize their use of the pagefile because it is
much slower than system memory, so the size of your pagefile is
irrelevant. You running lots of background processes that eat up
system memory (RAM) along with consuming CPU cycles and generating
disk I/O are more relevant to your game's response.
 
Does WinXP Home need a 'paging file' if the system has 4GB of memory
installed?
Click to expand...


You should *never* run without a page file, no matter how much memory
you have. If you did so, you wouldn't be able to use all the RAM you
have. That's because Windows pre-allocates page file space, in
anticipation of possibly needing to use it. Although that
pre-allocation speeds up page file use if it's needed, in most cases
if you have enough RAM, that pre-allocated space is never needed and
never actually gets used.

But if there is no page file, that pre-allocation has to get made in
real memory (RAM) instead. That means that the space for that
pre-allocation (and it can be substantial) is tied up and not
available for any other use.
 
You should *never* run without a page file, no matter how much memory
you have. If you did so, you wouldn't be able to use all the RAM you
have. That's because Windows pre-allocates page file space, in
anticipation of possibly needing to use it. Although that
pre-allocation speeds up page file use if it's needed, in most cases
if you have enough RAM, that pre-allocated space is never needed and
never actually gets used.

But if there is no page file, that pre-allocation has to get made in
real memory (RAM) instead. That means that the space for that
pre-allocation (and it can be substantial) is tied up and not
available for any other use.
Click to expand...

And what if a program tries to ask for more memory? I'd (possibly) expect
a crash. Well, unless XP is robust enough to intercede, and come back with
some error message, like "insufficient memory is available to run this
program".

(I'm not sure we'd always get such a courtesy message back in the Win9x days
:-)
 
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