Is that motherboard Dual Channel (2 or 4 RAM slots, not 3 or 6), then yes you need a 4th stick and you are taking a performance hit using 3.
If it's triple channel (a dead technology) then the 3 1gig sticks are correct.
I suggest using 1024 min max page file.
If it was on another HD the OS is not on, not just partition, that is best, although I would avoid it on SSD due to finite # of writes.
The smaller the better, you want windows using actual RAM as RAM, not much slower hard drive space as RAM.
I start at 1024 and if that works fine (expected) I'd not change it.
Letting Windows decide the virtual memory size could result in an often re-sized file, and fragmentation, 1024 should be plenty for most.
I suggest 0/0 min max, reboot, defragment the HD it's going on, and then 1024/1024 min max it and reboot again.
That was a much more critical helper with older windows versions with less RAM.
I also knew that the Intel 9xx CPU series was the last one using triple channel, it was a possible A+ exam fact.... muhahaha!
A smaller Page File uses less HDD/SSD space.
The "1.5x RAM size" recommendation dates back many years (probably pre-XP).
RAM was a lot more expensive in the past.
That said, my W2K8 server book also recommends "1.5x RAM size".
As a rule, W7 only uses a few hundred MB (on my PC).
Since I have mine set to 2048 MB minimum, it uses slighty more than that amount of space on my HDD.
tgfyhre, what does resource monitor > memory look like immediately after boot? Lots of things loading or some special program specifically addressing the pagefile?
My trusty old HP laptop got w7 32bit 4mb, 450mb fixed pagefile, and always have lots of memory available under all normal\daily use conditions, even with the 1gb+ set as reserved, & it's a fast, good machine. See attach.
Okay, well setting my pagefile to 1024 isn't working very well for me. I set it last night, and this morning I ran phpar (a multi-threaded par2 parity program) to create some parity backup for some files while I was surfing using Firefox, and several times Windows popped up a message that I was low on memory, and my browser became sluggish and unresponsive. I never got that message once before I switched my pagefile over to 1024. So I guess I'll just switch my pagefile back to where I had it initially (1.5x my RAM).
@4WD, I'll check my resource monitor the next time I reboot.
A good rules of thumbs is to star using the same amount of real storage as paging... Then you can tune it depending on your particular usage...
Quote