Understanding Windows Vista Paging File Size
If you've upgraded your Windows Vista computer's memory(RAM) after you installed the memory, you may be wondering why you suddenly lost some drive space.
In Windows XP, when you added more memory to your computer, you had to manually go and increase the size of your paging file to correctly match the amount of memory in your computer. Windows Vista does away with this by automatically setting the optimal size for the paging file, even after you add more memory to your computer.
For instance, if you had a computer with 1GB of memory, your paging file would be roughly 1300mb, but if you add another 1GB of memory to your computer to make a total of 2GB, now when you look at the paging file, it will have automatically increased:
You can turn this setting on and off by right-clicking the Computer icon, clicking the Advanced System Settings link, then clicking the Settings button under Performance:
Click the Advanced tab, and you should see the current size of the paging file as in the first screenshot. Click the Change button, and you'll finally see the checkbox to "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"
You can uncheck this box and set the paging file manually if you'd like. If you have a number of fast drives in your system, you could configure the system for optimal performance by using a faster drive for the paging file, but I'd recommend just leaving the default setting on in most cases.
It's best to Leave the Page file 500mb Above total System Memory..eg:
2gb of RAM, 2.5gb of Page file
can you help me ???
i dont understand - because i had 2GB RAM and OS set automatically SWAP to 3GB swap
now i have 4GB RAM and OS set automatically SWAP to 6GB swap… but i think its a unnecessary to have 6GB of SWAP file… can u help me ? may i set swap to lower value ?
XFR,
1.5 times your RAM is the standard Microsoft recommended setting. So 2Gb RAM is 3Gb Swap and 4Gb RAM = 6 Gb Swap. But these are just minimum recommended settings! I definitely wouldn't set it to a lower setting. That might seriously hamper your system!!!
I myself prefer a fixed swap file size of double the amount of my RAM. It is best to move your swapfile to a partition on another hdd. But do not move your swapfile to another partition if you have only one HDD. In that case leave it on C.
There's a lot of info about pagefiles/swapfiles on the net. You can easily confirm my recommendations. There's a lot more to know about this topic, but this should get you started.