I don’t understand this one at all.  I was looking to improve performance as my TR3 had become a dog.  So I started with my version of Diskeeper professional and made sure everything was defraged, even the page file and mft. no change. I made sure i was using the recommended page file size (for me, 1.5 gig).  That was okay, but I set the page file to zero, ran defrag to clean it up, and reset to 1.5 gig.  no change.

I did other things like turning off unneeded processes.  no change.  then i did this:

set paging file to zero. ran defrag.  left it like that.  it’s like i have a whole new machine!  zippy ya he ya ho. photoshop cs2 now processes raw files like they were text (used to take minutes/hours/days). EVERYTHING runs faster and my dashboard says I still have the same size swap file, so go figure (I guess without the page file, the swap file must be physical memory yes?)

and another interesting thing.  my system in this config will use up all available mem (all but about 16mb) with my fav programs running like Outlook, Opera, Photoshop, InDesign, QuickBooks 2005, etc. and still run noticably FASTER then when there was a page file!

So, what’s the deal? My C disk is 44% full without pagefile and 33% with one. Perhaps it’s an end of disk thing?  Where performance degrades faster at the end of disk then benifit from pagefile?  Got me.

ps. I have freemem pro running so maybe that’s why I can operate at a zippy pace even with only 20-30 mb of free mem showing…

Strange!
jigs

EDIT: well, after some testing I see that not having the memory available is problematic, ie. Photoshop CS (which I think creates it’s own paging/swap file) will choke with out of mem errors - mostly when trying to save to web. I suppose other cases exist.  But still, running like this is saving me so much time…not waiting behind the cursor for just about everything.

Not having a swap file is a bad practice in any modern operating system. I’d suggest that your page file was badly fragmented. Due to the way Windows locks the pagefile, defrag doesn’t defragment it properly.

Well, that’s why I got Diskeeper Pro, as it says it defrags the pagefile (does it at boot time). I am confident the pagefile was not fragmented, and my system was still slower than the cow outside my window.

so my tradeoff so far seems to be: way better performance & occassional out of mem errors vs. cowlike movement thru workflow and plenty of swap file (although I did manage to fill that up too).

I guess i need another laptop…any suggestions?
jigs