Is Page file useful?

A

ankushkool

Recruit
I have a Dell Studio 17 with Win 7 and 3 GB ram... and as a norm have reserved space for page file upto 3 GB!

But my concern is that most it the time my RAM is being used only around 50% and they system starts using the page file! why is it not using the RAM to its full potential! and what can be done about it?
 
For 99.999% of the configurations on the planet you need a page file. Windows 7 itself wants one and a number of programs out there do too. If you think you can run your machine optimally without a page file you do not understand how Windows 7 (or any NT based OS works).
In Windows 7 Page file size equal to RAM
Look at any tweaking site anywhere, and you'll receive many different opinions on how to deal with the pagefile—some sites will tell you to make it huge, others will tell you to completely disable it. The logic goes something like this: Windows is inefficient at using the pagefile, and if you have plenty of memory you should just disable it since RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive. By disabling it, you are forcing Windows to keep everything in much faster RAM all the time.

The problem with this logic is that it only really affects a single scenario: switching to an open application that you haven't used in a while won't ever grind the hard drive when the pagefile is disabled. It's not going to actually make your PC faster, since Windows will never page the application you are currently working with anyway.

The big problem with disabling your pagefile is that once you've exhausted the available RAM, your apps are going to start crashing, since there's no virtual memory for Windows to allocate—and worst case, your actual system will crash or become very unstable. When that application crashes, it's going down hard—there's no time to save your work or do anything else.

In addition to applications crashing anytime you run up against the memory limit, you'll also come across a lot of applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled. For instance, you really won't want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. You'll also notice some other strange, indefinable behavior when your pagefile is disabled—in my experience, a lot of things just don't always work right.

Windows 7 includes a file caching mechanism called SuperFetch that caches the most frequently accessed application files in RAM so your applications will open more quickly. It's one of the many reasons why Windows 7 feels so much more "snappy" than previous versions—and disabling the pagefile takes away RAM that Windows could be using for caching

Source: LifeHacker.com

Also if you are a good reader read : mark russinovich
 
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