Windows 7: Hard Faults - explain

Dear all,
I noticed that I was getting tens and sometimes hundreds of hard faults, and I read somewhere that it is an error when reading the pagefile (memory on the hard drive). I figure I have 8 gigs of ram (64 bit) and my system is never going past 2.5, so I disable the pagefile and restart.

I am now getting sometimes thousands of hard faults. I get the feeling what I read about hard faults was completely wrong. How can it be to do with the pagefile if I have no pagefile now?



Perhaps I have bad ram? This is a brand new laptop.

Stu

Many programs aquire memory workspace using the paging mechanism. But as long as there is real RAM available, that is immediately mapped to RAM addresses. So what you are seeing are false page faults. There is nothing to worry about.

ok thank you. Thats good to know

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault

But it should be noted that in a case like the OP's (8GB of RAM), an "increase of the amount of memory" is practically never required and the addresses are all mapped to real memory.