denmarfl said:
Your reply was very helpful; Thanks
Reviewing the article at the link provided it also outlines having 2 Page
Files to "speed up you PC"? Now this seems to work against moving the Page
File to another HDD. I do have a 2nd Internal HDD (E:\).... so if a user
were to use 2 Page Files, 1 would save on the C:\ the other on the E:\
file....wouldn't both page files be the same size...and therefore the issue
that I am experiencing, that is, using up 3GB HHD space daily on Restore
Points (Vista creates a "System Restore" point any day when no other activity
creates a Restore point)....that issue would contine.....since both Page
Files would be the same size and 1 would be on the C:\ drive?
I have not changed the Page File to my E:\ HDD as yet. The concern is, if I
had to use a prior Restore Point, wouldn't that restore point need the Page
File as part of it to restore my PC back to the Restore Point\Date selected
and since the Page File would not be part of the restore Point....my PC might
not restore properly?
I deleted all the old restore points immediately after moving the page
file so that I wouldn't run into the issue of having my changes undone
the moment I did a system restore with one of those old points. In my
case the restore points were essentially redundant since none of them
was more than 3 days old and all were essentially identical anyway. The
whole point of the excercise was to free up the space that all those
copies of pagefile.sys were consuming so that over time I could actually
start creating a useful collection of restore points again rather than
be limited by that handful of huge sized points which were only a few
days old at most.
As far as I can tell the page file is irrelevent to the actual system
restoration. I've only needed to do one system restore since moving
pagefile.sys and that went smoothly. AFAIK the only useful data that the
pagefile contains pertains to programs that are actually running in real
time, the rest being essentially a cache of software that you are likely
to be using during any given working session on the computer. There's
nothing in it that I know of which pertains to the actual
re-installation of the OS or software. The only slight benefit from
including the pagefile in SR, as far as I can see, would be to have a
ready to use intact cache matching the software as it exists in the
newly restored sytem. The alternatives would be that either the
non-restored pagefile might contain software that was removed from the
system during the restoration or the pagefile might need to be recreated
from scratch after a restoration. From my point of view neither of those
two scenarios is as bad as being limited to 5 or 6 system restore points
that might only be 2 or 3 day old duplicates of each other and wasting
20-30GB of SR harddrive space to hold them.
As far as concerns about using multiple page files, I think that amounts
to a bit of a red herring as far as we are concerned. IINM neither of us
knows enough about the workings of Windows WRT swapfile usage to make
any worthwhile changes to the system default of letting Windows manage
the pagefile. If it wasn't for the drive space issues affecting my
system restore points I wouldn't even have bothered moving the pagefile
to another drive, although the drive it is on now is slightly faster
than the system drive so there is that benefit.
Splitting the single file into multiple parts might be useful if drive
space is limited on your system drive (not able to create the optimum
sized swapfile) or if for some reason you wanted an especially large
swapfile. We could specify an arbitrary size for the pagefile, or
pagefiles, but I think it would be largely a waste of time and effort
for little or no real benefit. IMO system tweaks that save minutes of
operating time are worthwhile doing, those that save imperceptible
microseconds of data loading times aren't.
I have settled for: