Disabling Windows Virtual Memory?

Eunos · Post by **Eunos** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 2:04 pm

Just curious if anyone else has disabled Virtual Memory in Windows? I have been trying to get rid of the constant reading and writing to hard drive in XP, knowing it increases HD temps and reduces HD lifespan. Over time I have disabled Automatic Updates, Indexing and System Restore. Of course I'm being much more careful with backups now, too.

Yesterday I upgraded my memory to 1.5 gig and disabled Virtual Memory, and it seems to have reduced hard drive activity further. I don't know whether it will actually make the system faster overall or if I can expect problems. If anyone has any experience or input into this topic, or ideas of what else can be disabled

I'd be very interested!

Cheers.

PhilgB · Post by **PhilgB** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 3:02 pm

Microsoft recommends you leave it on and I think it's mostly used in the background or for reserved memory. What would be more important would be to disable the automatic harddrive layout with TweakUI and to get a more effective defragmenter than the one that comes with Windows.

Tephras · Post by **Tephras** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 3:24 pm

It was recently discussed in this thread.

Brian · Post by **Brian** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 5:40 pm

Yes, I've disabled virtual memory under Win2k on my internet / office box, which has 128 MB of RAM. It's so much nicer. It's great when I queue up some documents to read in Mozilla, and the hard drive spins down while I read them.

Even when the hard drive doesn't spin down, I do have fewer seeks and smoother, faster operation of programs.

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 7:50 pm

PhilgB wrote:Microsoft recommends you leave it on and I think it's mostly used in the background or for reserved memory. What would be more important would be to disable the automatic harddrive layout with TweakUI and to get a more effective defragmenter than the one that comes with Windows.

Can you please provide a reference to this information? When I tried to search Microsoft for this topic, I couldn't find anything.

Running WinXP Pro w/2GB w/o paging file for a while now - no problems. Advice given to not disable paging file is either obsolete or incorrect, IMO.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 11:16 pm

TomZ wrote:
PhilgB wrote:Microsoft recommends you leave it on and I think it's mostly used in the background or for reserved memory. What would be more important would be to disable the automatic harddrive layout with TweakUI and to get a more effective defragmenter than the one that comes with Windows.
Can you please provide a reference to this information? When I tried to search Microsoft for this topic, I couldn't find anything.

Running WinXP Pro w/2GB w/o paging file for a while now - no problems. Advice given to not disable paging file is either obsolete or incorrect, IMO.

More than likely it's Microsoft covering their arses. They don't want to be plagued with people complaining because weird stuff keeps happening on their machines.

I found the page mentioned just yesterday, I was Googling for "maximum windows xp memory" or something like that. It's pretty easy to find I think.

atomidude · Post by **atomidude** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:34 am

i disabled the pagefile months ago on my XP Pro PC that has 2GB RAM. never had a problem with it. my advice is to try it, it can't go that wrong

sure, helps to have plenty of RAM, such as 2GB+

PhilgB · Post by **PhilgB** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:22 am

Either way, my main point was that you should disable the auto layout feature and get something other than the windows disk defragmenter.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:49 am

This was just discussed very recently in the above linked thread. Please continue this discussion there. Thanks!