Aside from my AAO I have a desktop with 6GB of RAM and a Solid-State Drive. In the interest of prolonging the life of my SSD by limiting the number of (particularily unecessary) read/writes, I obviously want indexing turned off, but also I want paging turned off. Larry et al, please tell me there’s a sane way to do this?

A reg setting would be nice so it can be automated for my Microsoft Deployment Toolkit deployment share…

Cheers

I know that windows is going to try writing to it irregardless if your physical memory is low (and only when your physical memory is low), so knowing this, it did not make much sense to me to disable it …

I am a linux man, but I have repaired enough XP machines for clients (I also run a computer sales/service shop) to know that the paging file is pretty much necessary unless you have an obscene amount of RAM, and even then I would rather have a small paging file than have those annoying LOW MEMORY warning propts ..

Thank you for confirming my suspicions Larry!

I am running Ron(nl)’s XP image on my 512MB / 8GB SSD AAO with a page file EQUAL to my physical memory for both maximum and minimum values, and I don’t think I have had any lag yet ..

Setting the maximum and minimum virtual memory to the same number will prevent disk writing much more than disabling it … when you allow windows to manage the size of the vRAM, it is constantly calculating how much of the allowed space it needs/requires, but if you force it to use one size at all times, it will have far less calculating to do!

Happy netbooking!!

Disabling the pagefile will most certainly NOT prevent paging. It will probably increase it. Paging of program code, DLL’s etc., can not be prevented and does not use the pagefile. There is no need to copy this code to the pagefile as it can simply be reloaded from the original files. Disabling the pagefile only prevents paging of modified data. This unbalances the memory management system and will probably impair performance. In some cases this impairment can be severe.

The “DisablePagingExecutive” registry entry actually has nothing to do with the pagefile. This setting only effects paging of a small portion of the Kernel and this does not use the pagefile. By default Windows will keep frequently accessed portions of the kernel in RAM whenever possible. Only in the event of heavy memory load would it be paged out. Enabling the setting will force portions of the Kernel to remain in RAM at all times, even if they are rarely used. It is generally best to allow Windows to page as necessary and not impose arbitrary restrictions.

I would strongly urge all who read this not to make any changes in system settings unless you understand what they do. Doing this can cause serious problems as well as impairing performance. The internet is notorious for spreading misinformation. The descriptions of these settings is rarely adequate and is often wrong.

Unless you really understand a system setting and have a specific reason to change it – LEAVE IT ALONE.

Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA