Is it safe to move the page file?

Hi all,

Im just curious to know if its possible to move the location of the page file. I have heard if indeed its ok to do so that it can improve the performance of gaming etc if its put onto a seperate partiton to the OS.

Im a bit of a novice when it comes to page files but as far as i am aware mine is automatically setup and its roughly around the 8gb mark at the mo. I did notice while looking in the performance monitor tab in task manager that although i was only using 1.5gb of my 4gb RAM my machine was using around 2gb of the 8gb page file, do certain applications require the use of the page file? i just assumed it would be used once there is no more RAM avaliable im sure i wrong tho lol

Hope someone could shed some light on this for me, id be so grateful

Many thanks & merry xmas everyone

Thanks for that mate really appreciate it, i do have a spare 320gb hd that i could throw into my rig but to be honest i would not want to use the whole thing for a page file, would putting putting the page file on a partition on a different hd to the os be ok.

Sorry if im sounding a bit dim lol

Ok cool cheers matey one last thing tho is there a recomended page file size to go by.

+rep for your help mate im very grateful

Just one other consideration here...

If you have your power-save settings such that hard drives spin-down after some period (e.g. 15 minutes) of inactivity, placing the PAGEFILE.SYS on another drive will change that drive usage to such that it will NOT spin-down. Or, if you spin it down, it will spin back up.

Even if you think you're not doing anything, and even if you manually spin-down that drive (using some program such as HDDScan) the second "system drive" will just spin right back up again, as the OS accesses the page file occasionally even when you have plenty of RAM and shouldn't be doing any paging.

Just a consideration.

Create two partitions on that other hard drive - one for the pagefile at the "beginiing" of the disk, the other for other uses. Data is read faster and seeks are faster at the beginning of the disk (which is really the outer edge of the disk platter). You will get better performance from the pagefile by assuring it is at the logical beginning of the disk and you can assure that it is by creating a partition for it there.

See the disk benchmarking in these forums:

Show us your hard drive performance

to see how the performance of a disk changes in going across the platter.

Gene