Increasing page file

[tallterri98]

Hi
I have been getting massive low virtual memory warning and pages shutting down.
It told me to increase the size.
After checkng what was running in the background and seeing it was usually only my ISP and whatever program was open, I increased the page file from the initial size of the reccomended 384 to the max of 768.
Is this a bad move I made and if so, what should I have increased
it to? So far I am not getting the errors and shut downs I was.
It was so bad I could not shut down windows or my computer.
I do have 47 running process but only very few allowed me to end them.
Access was denied to end most.

[John Prophet]

Well...we would need to know;

what OS you are running.
How much RAM do you have in the comp.
Is some of the RAM shared with the video etc (in other words do you have onboard video etc)

By you saying you have services running etc...sound slike you have XP (or maybe W2000)

If its XP you should know that you have a lot of junk running that you dont need..all those services etc.

Look here www.blackviper.com and find the page about "xp services" and he has a diagram or two showing which services you can safely disable.

I think this might be the link http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm

You run "services.msc" and then you simply highlight the service and click "properties" then you set it to "disable" to cut it off.

Some of it is obvious..likeif you dont have a wireless network, you dont need "wireless zero configuration" running.

There are many you dont need but I cant remember many off the top of my head.

Some unneeded ones are

Portable Media serial number
Error Reporting
Windows Messenger (not related to msn messenger)
Secondary logon
Smart Card
Smart card helper

on and on

Most of them are "junk" and they just use up your resources for no reason.

JP

[DoctorReno]

There is always a lot of debate on how you should manage your Paging/swap file. I think it's accepted that if you have two drives and they are of equal speed that putting the swap/page file on the second drive will give better performance. With the NT based OS's splitting the paging file across both drives is often recommended.
Also there may some benefits to creating a dedicated partition on the second drive for the swap/page file.

I have a question on that subject: Could any performance be gained by setting an allocation unit size smaller or larger than the likely 4k defaut size. Elaborate on why larger/smaller and what size would be ideal or better.

I suspect any gains would be so minimal from this as to be insignificant but I was just curious.

Thanks