Move Pagefile to a non-OS disk ?

[DarkStar GT]

I have seen elsewhere the suggestion that moving the Pagefile to another disk can improve performance.

Has anyone tried this? How do you do it? And what were the results?

Secondly, if you have 8GB and Windows 7 64-bit how big, if any, a pageFile do you need?

 

[Jonathan_King]

See this article for how to move the page file: How to move the paging file in Windows XP
I know that article is for XP, but it is the same in 7.

The advantage of moving the page file to another drive is that the hard disk load is spread between multiple drives, therefore decreasing activity on your OS drive.

That means that the OS drive is free to do other things, and not always be referencing the page file.

Hope this helps.

~JK

 

[CommonTater]

I have seen elsewhere the suggestion that moving the Pagefile to another disk can improve performance.

Has anyone tried this? How do you do it? And what were the results?

Secondly, if you have 8GB and Windows 7 64-bit how big, if any, a pageFile do you need?

Johnathan has this basically correct. I would just like to add that moving the pagefile to another partition on the same physical drive often backfires as it creates a lot of long seek activity that can actually degrade system performance. If you move it to a different physical drive yes it can help a bit.

However... unless you are running monster apps or doing a lot of serious gaming you might first experiment with disabling the pagefile altogether. I'm on 32 bit with no pagefile and the performance gain is significant.

 

[DarkStar GT]

Got it, thank you guys, that's pointing me in the right direction.

... here's a follow-up question:
With a dual-boot system (XP Home and Windows 7 partitions on one disk) can I have a single pagefile on another disk (in its own partition) which can be used by either OS?

Or do I need a separate Pagefile for each OS? (incompatible formats?, persistent state? etc)

 

[Jonathan_King]

Each OS will need its own page file, I believe.