Windows without a swapfile

[whabang]

I've been runningn Windows without swapfile for the last week. The performance jump is actually noticable; and my harddrives probably feel a lot better. So far, no applications have complained about the lack of memory, and I generally have around 400 megs of free RAM.
I doubt it would work good on low-memory systems, though.

Has anyone experienced any major difference between 768 and 1024 megs of RAM?.

[Turambar]

Interesting. What version of windows are you using? I have 1024mb ram so if you're using XP i'll give it a go too.

[bloodline]

I run WindowsXP on 512Meg with no swapfile. I am even using massive files as that machine is my Music machine.

[whabang]

XP Home.
It handles it much better than Windows 2000 ever did.

[KennyR]

It's not something I'd recommend for 24/7 use. AFAIK Windows sometimes uses swap to defrag physical memory. Not too sure about that though.

[seer]

AFAIK, XP will still use a pagefile. Look in the taskmanager. You may need to add a few columns.

Also, check the registry, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive. Page file on or of, it's 0.

I may be wrong, but having used XP with 1Gb ram and no pagefile set, yes the systems seems more responsive. Haven't looked to deep into this tho.

If you want/need a page file, setup windows like it's a linux system. Put it on a different drive then where windows lives..

[blobrana]

Yea,
plus you could have a look at these `simple tips` .... (+ 2 red herrings)


[disclaimer : You have to know what your doing]

[whabang]

KennyR wrote:
It's not something I'd recommend for 24/7 use. AFAIK Windows sometimes uses swap to defrag physical memory. Not too sure about that though.

Well,
you don't truly disable the page-file; you simply make it so small (max 0 mb) that it uses usual RAM instead. It is true that Windows' RAM-handling gets less efficient this way (swapped things get swapped to another place in RAM), but RAM is so much faster than a HD, that you'll think things go faster.

There are ways to disable the swap-file, but this includes serious registry hacking, and will probably {bleep} up your system good.