What is a Pagefile and How Do I Adjust It?

Before we get into the details, let's review what the pagefile actually does. When your system runs low on RAM because an application like Firefox is taking too much memory, Windows moves the least used "pages" of memory out to a hidden file named pagefile.sys in the root of one of your drives to free up more RAM for the applications you are actually using. What this actually means to you is that if you've had an application minimized for a while, and you are heavily using other applications, Windows is going to move some of the memory from the minimized application to the pagefile since it's not being accessed recently. This can often cause restoring that application to take a little longer, and your hard drive may grind for a bit.

If you want to take a look at your own pagefile settings, launch sysdm.cpl from the Start menu search or run box (Win+R) and navigate to Advanced –> Settings –> Advanced –> Change. From this screen you can change the paging file size (see image above), set the system to not use a paging file at all, or just leave it up to Windows to deal with—which is what I'd recommend in most cases.

Why Do People Say We Should Disable It?

Look at any tweaking site anywhere, and you'll receive many different opinions on how to deal with the pagefile—some sites will tell you to make it huge, others will tell you to completely disable it. The logic goes something like this: Windows is inefficient at using the pagefile, and if you have plenty of memory you should just disable it since RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive. By disabling it, you are forcing Windows to keep everything in much faster RAM all the time.

The problem with this logic is that it only really affects a single scenario: switching to an open application that you haven't used in a while won't ever grind the hard drive when the pagefile is disabled. It's not going to actually make your PC faster, since Windows will never page the application you are currently working with anyway.

Disabling the Pagefile Can Lead to System Problems

The big problem with disabling your pagefile is that once you've exhausted the available RAM, your apps are going to start crashing, since there's no virtual memory for Windows to allocate—and worst case, your actual system will crash or become very unstable. When that application crashes, it's going down hard—there's no time to save your work or do anything else.

In addition to applications crashing anytime you run up against the memory limit, you'll also come across a lot of applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled. For instance, you really won't want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. You'll also notice some other strange, indefinable behavior when your pagefile is disabled—in my experience, a lot of things just don't always work right.

Less Space for File Buffers and SuperFetch

If you've got plenty of RAM in your PC, and your workload really isn't that huge, you may never run into application crashing errors with the pagefile disabled, but you're also taking away from memory that Windows could be using for read and write caching for your actual documents and other files. If your drive is spending a lot of time thrashing, you might want to consider increasing the amount of memory Windows uses for the filesystem cache, rather than disabling the pagefile.

Windows 7 includes a file caching mechanism called SuperFetch that caches the most frequently accessed application files in RAM so your applications will open more quickly. It's one of the many reasons why Windows 7 feels so much more "snappy" than previous versions—and disabling the pagefile takes away RAM that Windows could be using for caching. Note: SuperFetch was actually introduced in Windows Vista.

Put the Pagefile on a Different Drive, Not Partition

The next piece of bad advice that you'll see or hear from would-be system tweakers is to create a separate partition for your pagefile-which is generally pointless when the partition is on the same hard drive. What you should actually do is move your pagefile to a completely different physical drive to split up the workload.

What Size should my Pagefile Be?

Seems like every IT guy I've ever talked to has stated the "fact" that your pagefile needs to be 1.5 to 2x your physical RAM—so if you have a 4GB system, you should have an 8GB pagefile. The problem with this logic is that if you are opening 12 GB worth of in-use applications, your system is going to be extremely slow, and your hard drive is going to grind to the point where your PC will be fairly unusable. You simply will not increase or decrease performance by having a gigantic pagefile; you'll just use up more drive space.

Mark Russinovich, the well-known Windows expert and author of the Sysinternals tools, says that if you want to optimize your pagefile size to fit your actual needs, you should follow a much different formula: The Minimum should be Peak Commit – Physical RAM, and the Maximum should be double that.

For example, if your system has 4GB of RAM and your peak memory usage was 5GB (including virtual memory), you should set your pagefile to at least 1GB and the maximum as 2GB to give you a buffer to keep you safe in case a RAM-hungry application needs it. If you have 8GB of RAM and a max 3GB of memory usage, you should still have a pagefile, but you would probably be fine with a 1 GB size. Note: If your system is configured for crash dumps you'll need to have a larger pagefile or Windows won't be able to write out the process memory in the event of a crash—though it's not very useful for most end-users.

The other size-related advice is to set the minimum and maximum size as the same so you won't have to deal with fragmentation if Windows increases the size of the pagefile. This advice is rather silly, considering that most defrag software will defragment the pagefile even if Windows increases the size, which doesn't happen very often.

The Bottom Line: Should You Disable It?

As we've seen, the only tangible benefit of disabling the pagefile is that restoring minimized applications you haven't used in a while is going to be faster. This comes at the price of not being able to actually use all your RAM for fear of your applications crashing and burning once you hit the limit, and experiencing a lot of weird system issues in certain applications.

The vast majority of users should never disable the pagefile or mess with the pagefile settings—just let Windows deal with the pagefile and use the available RAM for file caching, processes, and Superfetch. If you really want to speed up your PC, your best options are these:

• Upgrade your RAM.
• Clean off the crapware—the biggest cause of system slowdown.
• Switch to Microsoft Security Essentials and stop paying for bloated Windows security packages.
• Windows 7 handles multi-tasking much better than Windows XP did.

If you want to read more extremely detailed information about how virtual memory and your pagefile really work, be sure to check out Mark Russinovich's article on the subject, which is where much of this information was sourced.

The How-To Geek has tested pagefile settings extensively and thinks everybody should just upgrade to Windows 7 already. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Occasionally, nature's music of scraped soil and rocks is augmented by a loud creak from the giant gramophone horn. If you must know what that sounds like, check out the surreal 11+ minute video.

Harvest by Alunda Kyrkokör (2009) from Olle Corneer on Vimeo.

The "Harvest" performance was part of the Volt Music Festival in Sweden. The group wants to bring the terrafon to other croplands soon, so if you hear what sounds like a really loud plow in your backyard, go give the team a hand. That thing looks heavy. [Create Digital Music via Inhabitat]

The main bottleneck in any NAS is the RAID engine. Since many NAS units don't include a dedicated controller, oftentimes the speed of the drive just doesn't matter. If you're using a blazing-fast hardware RAID card in your own custom built setup, then drive speed might make a difference. But for most consumer units, the controller is the bottleneck.

With that in mind, you can go with slower 5400 RPM drives that reduce power consumption, generate less heat, and will likely cost less up front too. Even if you have a dedicated RAID card that could let a 7200 RPM drive do it's thing at full speed, I'd consider the benefits of low-power drives to outweigh the marginal speed increase you might see.

This chart shows the difference between Samsung 7200 and 5400 RPM drives in various RAID configurations:

Not much, right? So think twice before you drop more than necessary on 7200 RPM drives for your backup unit. Check out the link for the full test rundown. [Tom's Hardware]

According to DownloadSquad, the new 1.1 software worked well on the beta 7 install, save for a single error message that didn't seem to have any effect on the changes. Overall, the tweaker allows users to customize their UI and performance with a single click—it can even fit on a flash drive for portability. Plus, its free—so you have nothing to lose. [Ultimate Windows Tweaker via DownloadSquad via on10]

Created in collaboration with New York artist Peter Coffin, the 23-feet aluminum UFO is covered with 3,000 individually controlled Color Kinetics LED nodes, and gets its power from an on-board 6kw generator. And get this: you really can "phone home" with this UFO, as its displays are remote-controllable via SMS messaging.

It was flown in by mountain-rescue pilots, sweeping in from the Polish coast and circling over central Gdansk just after sunset. The whole performance was part of Gdansk Festival of Stars, and was the first showing of the artwork. And I really, really wish I could've seen it. [Cinimod Studio]
(Photo credits: Peter Turo, Dominic Harris, Michal Szlaga.)

Update: According to Dominic himself, the UFO was greeted with everything from cheers to laughs to screams. And here's an interesting bit of news: discussions are underway to bring the flying saucer to the US. Once they've worked out all the pesky FAA details of course. —Thanks, Dominic

1. After several common business operations, Vista was more responsive after rebooting as compared to Windows XP
2. Generally, Vista and XP were equally responsive on most test operations
3. Aero had little to no negative effect on the responsiveness of Vista

More responsive after boot? Equally responsive on most applications? Little effect on responsiveness? Wow. That totally doesn't jive with everything else we've been hearing. Maybe Microsoft did something right with Vista after all? – Jason Chen

Study: Aero user interface has little effect on performance [Ars Technica]

Scoring times in photoshop a full 24 seconds faster in Photoshop, and 45 seconds faster in Compressor, the Core 2 Duo models quite speedy, but not 39% faster. In fact, in some tests they were only marginally faster (a time of 1:06 down to 1:01, time of 0:58 to 0:54, and frame rate of 59 to 63.9). In tasks that were more processor oriented, the Core 2 Duo's speed improvements were "substantial". In disk or graphics intensive tasks, were quite a bit smaller. Just be aware what kind of performance gains you're getting when you upgrade to a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. – Jason Chen

Benchmarks: MacBook Pro gets its Core 2 Duo boost [MacWorld]

Product page

I now have a new found appreciation for lunchmeat. Twenty-four-year-old computer engineering graduate and musician Shaduz from Bologna developed a MIDI glove which can be used to manipulate music and sounds. The 3DID MIDI glove just isn't any glove, though—it's wireless and was built for about 150 euros, or $180. The glove features three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and 18 hours of battery life. It also has five "bend" sensors in the fingers for bending and manipulating musical instruments. Perfect for softsynths. To really get a feel for the glove, you'll need to watch this video of Shaduz DJ-ing minimalistic techno with it and manipulating the sounds perfectly. One of the most original and coolest musical creations in years.

Guy playing live with 150 wireless MIDI glove [Music Thing]