Are you tired of hearing your PC crunch like crazy when loading applications or playing a game?  If the answer is a resounding yes, consider yourself not alone.  Adding actual physical RAM (Random Access Memory) to your machine can be an unneeded expense to increase your PC’s performance for many.

If you currently have a second hard drive in your computer, it would be extremely wise to allow your page file to reside on the hard drive that does not contain your Windows OS, gaming, and resource-intensive application files.  When the Windows OS needs additional memory; it accesses the page file on your hard drive.  For a good example, consider you’re playing the popular Crysis video game published by EA (Electronic Arts) and currently have 2 gigabytes of physical memory.  Crysis and the Windows OS’s system files and any other background processes running will at times need more than the 2 gigabytes of installed memory.

To access the needed additional memory, Windows will store the bits of information in the swap file.  It is limited only by the size you set it as or the size of your hard drive if you let Windows manage it.  As a result of this usage of a file residing on your hard drive and the hard drive’s slow mechanical nature, your performance will suffer anytime the page file needs to be written to.  Having the page file on the same hard drive as your Windows OS and games, etc. will be really slow because it takes extra time for a hard drive to access two or more separate locations on a hard drive storage platter.  By setting the page file to a separate hard drive, less files are needed to be accessed on one hard drive at once, effectively making Crysis in the above example run at a faster pace.   This would apply not only to Crysis, but to other games and applications on your PC as well.

————————————–

It also pays to optimize your page file to be set within a small range, which will entirely depend on the amount of physical memory you have installed, the operating system you are running, and the amount of page file usage you need to utilize.  Start task manager by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del and go to the Performance tab.  When you have properly optimized your swap file, you will notice that almost all of your physical memory will be cached.  If it’s half and half between your RAM and the page swap, consider making your page swap smaller.  As a general rule of thumb, make the swap file size as small as possible for the minimum value and keep the range between the minimum and maximum no more than 256 megabytes.  This will keep fragmentation of the swap file to a minimum.

Modifying the swap file is easy:  select the settings selection of the advanced tab under system in control panel and from there go to the advanced tab.  Change the swap file to be located on the non-OS residing hard drive in your PC, type in the desired range, and then select Set.  After doing this, a restart will be required.

—————————————

For all of those out there who don’t have a second hard drive, Windows Vista can set your flash drive of adequate size (usually a gig or two will suffice) to store the page file.  This is convenient because you don’t have to worry about fragmentation on a flash drive and the same principal applies as with a second hard drive:  your main mechanical drive will have to be in one less place on the platter than it otherwise would.  To have Vista do this, simply insert your flash drive and select to use ready boost.  If the option isn’t there, either your flash drive is too small or an older flash drive with inadequate transfer speed capabilities to be an effective source for your swap file.

*Tip:  Visit AusLogics‘ website and download their Registry and Disk Defragmenter programs.  They are completely free and work very well at what they were programmed to do.  Disk Defragmenter is faster than Windows’ built in one and will keep your disk crunching to a minimum and defragment that speed vital page file.  The registry defragmenter will defragment your system registry and make it smaller.  Since the registry resides in physical memory, this effectively increases the amount of your physical memory.  Considering these two programs are free, you lose nothing by checking them out.