Deleting the Page File?

With the Compaq Presario 2100 Notebook back to a good working performance after the three-day Right Mouse Click Opens Another Firefox Tab experience, as most files have already been back-up to the external drive, I proceeded with creating a new partition to host solely the page file, pagefile.sys.

I have been reading in the past that with a 512MB RAM system, one could assign the pagefile.sys in another drive or another partition. Prior to doing that, I searched for pertinent articles on this matter on how to safely go about it.

Reading an on-line article by Alex Nichol, entitled: Virtual Memory in Windows XP (2006)

“The page file in XP is a hidden file called pagefile.sys. It is regenerated at each boot — there is no need to include it in a backup. To see it you need to have Folder Options | View set to ‘Show Hidden and System files’, and not to ‘Hide Protected mode System files’.”

Doing that, the pagefile.sys in my Notebook occupied about 1,500MB created a few minutes after I logged on. Although, there were articles that also cited the fact that the page file could be in another partition, rather than another physical drive, with this Notebook, moreover, only one physical hard drive exists, thus it left no option but to do this on another partition. For now, installing another hard drive was a costly option.

Answering the question: Should the file be left on Drive C:?, Nichol states:

“The slowest aspect of getting at a file on a hard disk is in head movement (‘seeking’). If you have only one physical drive then the file is best left where the heads are most likely to be, so where most activity is going on — on drive C:. If you have a second physical drive, it is in principle better to put the file there, because it is then less likely that the heads will have moved away from it. If, though, you have a modern large size of RAM, actual traffic on the file is likely to be low, even if programs are rolled out to it, inactive, so the point becomes an academic one. If you do put the file elsewhere, you should leave a small amount on C: — an initial size of 2MB with a Maximum of 50 is suitable — so it can be used in emergency. Without this, the system is inclined to ignore the settings and either have no page file at all (and complain) or make a very large one indeed on C:

“In relocating the page file, it must be on a ‘basic’ drive. Windows XP appears not to be willing to accept page files on ‘dynamic’ drives.

“NOTE: If you are debugging crashes and wish the error reporting to make a kernel or full dump, then you will need an initial size set on C: of either 200 MB (for a kernel dump) or the size of RAM (for a full memory dump). If you are not doing so, it is best to make the setting to no more than a ‘Small Dump’, at Control Panel | System | Advanced, click Settings in the ‘Startup and Recovery’ section, and select in the ‘Write Debug information to’ panel.”

As the installed PowerQuest PartitionMagic software becoming unreliable in the past, however hard I tried to increase the size of the logical partition, the system would generate an error, after executing:

autocheck xmnt2001 /bat=C:\WINDOWS\system32\PQ_BATCH.PQB /dbg=C:\WINDOWS\system32\PQ_DEBUG.TXT /ver=262144 /prd=“PartitionMagic”

that it could not find the file xmnt2001, I have given up re-partitioning the hard drive after searching on-line help, seeing the same complaints, but to no avail led to a workable solution. Worst of all, after sometime, the system once re-booted complained that autocheck was skipped because it could not find autochk.exe, although the file was physically present in the system. Found out later that adding autocheck autochk.exe to Registry would revert the process. Doing so, moreover, PartitionMagic could not successfully complete the re-partitioning.

While googling Virtualization the other night, I came across EASEUS offering Partition Master 7.1.1 Home Edition for free, downloaded then installed that. After installation, tried to re-partition the drive by increasing the size of the logical drive to 1.5GB from the free space in physical drive. Crossing my fingers, that a power failure might not occur, after a system reboot the re-partitioning went as scheduled, and successfully did the job.

Rebooting as prompted, Windows XP then restarted to show the physical drive reduced in size while the logical drive size increased as planned.

Clicking right My Computer then selecting Properties, then choosing Advanced tab for the System Properties, and clicked the Settings button under Performance panel. In the Performance Options window, clicked Advanced tab, and clicked the Change button under Virtual Memory.

Recalling to mind, Nichol’s suggestion, decided to leave about 2 – 50MB page file in the basic drive, Drive C, and allocated a system managed size in the logical drive, Drive D. Decided not to totally delete the page file in Drive C, after all, to take care of a ‘Small Dump’ during a system crash.! Changed the settings for Drive D to a maximum of 1000MB.

After doing that, the system cautioned that it would erase the existing pagefil.sys in Drive C, clicked OK, no reboot. Viewing the root directories of each drive, see snapshot right, the bulk of the page file have been transferred to Drive D: and I am sensing that a slight change in the performance, especially during system shutdown. A Piriform Defraggler most recent snapshot of Drive D shows contiguous instances of the Page File (in pale orange) and the Reserved MFT space (in violet). Hope it remains the same, i.e., fragmentation minimal.

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Notes:

Nichol, Alex (2006). Virtual Memory in Windows XP. On-line: Windows Support Center, James A. Eshelman, Proprietor & Webmaster, 21 February 2006. back to text.

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