Guild Wars 2

Hi,

My Pagefile.sys file in the windows folder keeps disappearing and reappearing upon reboots. I noticed my SSD sometimes has 10 gigs more space when it disappears and sometimes has 10 gigs less when it reappears.

Anyone know whats going on?

Yeah. Your pagefile.sys file is disappearing and or being temperamental. If you have more than 8 GB of RAM, do yourself and SSD a favor and disable it. Or move it to the hard drive if you have that and want to continue using a pagefile for virtual memory. Swap files (page files) are HORRIBLE on SSD life spans.

Avelos.6798:

Yeah. Your pagefile.sys file is disappearing and or being temperamental. If you have more than 8 GB of RAM, do yourself and SSD a favor and disable it. Or move it to the hard drive if you have that and want to continue using a pagefile for virtual memory. Swap files (page files) are HORRIBLE on SSD life spans.

Oh really? Can anyone confirm this?

How do I disable pagefile.sys?

You go to computer, system properties, advanced system properties in the top left of the window, then to the Advanced tab of the smaller window, in the box marked "Performance"click that button Settings then to the next Advanced tab.

“Virtual Memory” there should be some numbers and some words here blah blah blah then click “Change” Window pops up, one of the options is to “No pagefile” and I click that. Keep in mind I only recommend that if you have 8 GB or more RAM. It just makes everything use the actual RAM and it’s much faster, and all that stuff. At the expense of having less free RAM which shouldn’t be much less anyway. I have 16 GB so it’s fine.

SSDs are more valued for read times than write times. More write and delete will degrade them faster and faster. That might be different with new SSD but it’s a good habit to take.

is this a good idea?

KlaviersPsilocybinVein.4821:

is this a good idea?

Depends on what you do. If you have 100+ tabs open in a browser and play demanding games like GTA IV at the same time, you really don’t want to do that…

With that in mind though, I’ve ran without a page file for a few months with 8GB of RAM, and was fine. At the most though I only had around 10 tabs open in a browser at a time, and closed the browser when playing games. GW2 on its own ran fine without a paging file.

If I had around 16GB of RAM, I’d definitely feel confident running without a paging file (based on my usage). 8GB was fine for me too, but explorer crashed (out-of-memory) one time when I was playing GTA IV with nothing else (memory demanding) open.

I suggest checking memory usage when you do normal tasks (with Resource Monitor). Keep an eye on Free and Standby memory.

yea, dont disable the pagefile. Windows is designed to run with it. Even if you have 32gigs of ram, if you disable the page file eventually the system will become unstable and need to be rebooted (Unless you are running ECC enabled memory).

Dont put the page file on the SSD, put it on a USB3.0 flash or HDD. Unless you have a high quality SSD that supports TRIM, the PageFile will actually damage the SSD.

I’d have to say that Windows is designed to run with or without the pagefile since there’s an option to delete it… I’ve had my pagefile disabled on my own machine for the past two years and it was just fine.

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it