| By Fred Langa |
Caveat lector (translation: “reader beware”): The Web is filled with outdated and incomplete Windows-tuning tips.
Following the wrong advice on tweaking the pagefile to boost your PC’s speed can actually reduce rather than enhance your system’s performance.
Relocating your pagefile not always a good idea
James Woodruff offers a suggestion in response to the item in my May 14 column, “Can you save space by capping the pagefile size?”:
- “I have used a suggestion from [a Web-based computer book] and moved the pagefile to another HD and sized it equal to my PC’s RAM in both the initial and maximum size blocks. I also run Diskeeper and Spin Rite, so defrag isn’t a major problem.
“Works for me.”
In its original form, the advice usually also said to create a new, empty partition on that second drive and move your pagefile to that private partition, again to prevent fragmentation. But modern tools can defrag an in-use pagefile just fine. (Need one? Try Sysinternals’ free PageDefrag, which you can download from Microsoft’s TechNet site.)
Also, pagefile data isn’t stored serially; even if the pagefile itself is fully defragged, the information within it will still be randomly accessed. Some modest pagefile fragmentation really isn’t that big a deal, and modern tools make that level of defragging easy.