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5 Posts

4426

November 19th, 2007 07:00

Creating a separate partition for the paging file on a single hard drive in a laptop?

I have a new (still in box) Inspiron 1520 laptop, 250 GB 5400 hard drive, 4 G of Ram...
 
I was planning on reloading all the software - removing some of the bloat - and creating separate partitions for my operating system (C); for the Program Files (D), and for the My Documents data (E).  Does this make sense?
 
Is there any point to creating another partition, a separate partition for the paging file on a single hard drive in a laptop? I've read that doing this makes sense only if one has a separate physical HD.  If it does make sense, how big should it be? I've read 1.5xRAM, but another source suggested larger...
 
Thanks
 
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GreyMack

2.2K Posts

November 19th, 2007 16:00

Your new PC may already be using multiple partitions for other purposes, so take a look at what's there and how it works before planning any changes.

GM

jcn77056

667 Posts

November 19th, 2007 21:00

You don't really need to do that.  If you're running XP, do the following.  For Vista, it should be close to this:
 
  • When you get your laptop up and running, right-click on My Computer and select Properties.
  • Click on the Advanced tab
  • Click on Performance Settings
  • Click the advanced tab again.
  • Under Virtual Memory, click Change
  • Change the paging file size from System Managed to Custom
  • Set the Initial size and Maximum size to the same number, twice the size of physical memory.
  • Click OK all the way out and reboot

When the system reboots, it will go out and extend the pagefile to the set values.  If everything went right, at most you should have the pagefile in two pieces.  If you want to have it contiguous (one big piece), you have to use an off-line defragmenter to compress the files.

I'm not sure how much this will buy you.  You really want to avoid paging at all costs.  Having sufficient memory and only running what you need to is the only way to do that.

chevron8

5 Posts

November 20th, 2007 02:00

thank you, that's helpful.
 
regards
 
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