Windows 7: Paging file system will not set

Just love these new issues with the RTM bits. Never saw on earlier builds.

So, I have a computer that defaults to no paging file set.
No matter what I try, it will not let any paging file be set,
always goes back to nothing set.

Any ideas?

Dave

Hello Dave,

It may a corrupted install. You might see if doing a repair install may help.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I have the same issue too,
I have Vista installed on C: and 7 on A: (partitioned from C, Vista's page file is system managed but 7 is not set, would having Vista there make any difference? (soz for hijackin your thread :P)

It's been the same for me since 7100 and i've reinstalled/repaired multiple times, no dice.

This is what I get, and it is the same in each OS (the active OS is always C:\). The other drives DO have paging files on them (except for the external, obviously), but they are only active for their respective OSes.


Always allow your OSes to choose the drive letter they want. Invariably, this will be C:. Don't worry about conflicts - the boot manager automatically takes care of that. I'm surprised that you have managed to name a partition as A:. Both A: and B: are reserved for floppy drives, and are usually unavailable. As regards having Vista and Windows 7 installed simultaneously, see above.

Actually this ISN'T always the best advice - particularly if your C drive (assume the OS is running from C) is getting full. With 4 / 8 / 16 GB RAM systems these days if you have the WHOLE paging file on C apart from extra hassles on C running one LARGE page file your OS might suddenly HALT if and when you do run out of disk space.

Rule of thumb typically for OS'es (Operating system design 101) is that paging file size (aka swap files in Linux) should be approx 50% the size of REAL RAM in the system.

With larger RAM systems its better to have multiple paging files over different drives -- with larger memory computers you will certainly be running more concurrent applications - but not necessarily larger ones so you don't need to have the system continually accessing a 4GB page file on C when it doesn't need to.

On a laptop with a single hard drive split into partitions its still better to split the page drive as accessing a larger 4GB file continually will / can lead to severe performance degradations once your system starts to page.

Keep I/O's down to as small as possible on things like laptops.


On servers etc the reverse is true -- if you need to access a file or data base in an application get as much of it in "one go" as you can.

Cheers
jimbo

That is incorrect. If you have multiple HDDs on your system (and I mean physical drives, except for those configured into a RAID array where they count as a single entity), then you can have a paging file on each running simultaneously. If you have only a single drive that is partitioned then spreading the paging file over these partitions can actually degrade system performance because the drive head has got to move more to access the data, particularly if that data happens to straddle 2 or more sections of the paging file (i.e. the required data lies at the end of one section and the beginning of another). The best solution, if you are able to adopt it, is to have a small drive that is solely dedicated to the paging file and nothing else. However, in many systems that is impractical.

Apart from real workhorses, i fail to see the need to have pagefile at all for >8gb systems.

RAM is not there to leave empty, otherwise just put 2gb in the thing and be done with it.

Actually, in general, this doesn't really matter. The reason why is that in Windows, all memory is virtual memory, which means that two contiguous pages of memory may appear to look like they're next to each other in memory, but they could be anywhere in physical memory. The same is true of the swap file. Two contiguous pages of virtual memory may not be next to each other in the swap file either.

The swap file is truly random access.

The only exception to this is if your cluster size is not a multiple of the memory page size, however NTFS's default size is 4k, the same size as most virtual memory pages (Itanium, I think, uses 8k pages). In which case, a single virtual memory page may span two extents.

I tried a repair with the upgrade reinstall, still fails.

Dave

There are multiple reasons for having a pagefile - if you choose to not use one, then you'll forgoe the benefits.

FWIW - I went 6 months without a pagefile in 32 bit XP and 32 bit Vista (both with 4 gB of RAM). The system ran fine without it - but I'd done the research to understand what I was giving up.

I went back to using a pagefile when a game that I installed complained about the lack of it.