Sizing up your boot drive's pagefile
By
Scott Dunn
My
Feb. 28
article discussed ways to save space on your Windows drive when you have multiple hard drives or partitions.
You can save even more space by shrinking the Windows pagefile on the boot disk, as long as you don't care about preserving some complex debugging data.
On that subject, reader Doug McRae has these observations:
- "I've been building PCs (as a hobby) for a number of years, and have always installed two hard disk drives in new builds. ... I put a small pagefile on each partition, setting each to a 150 to 500MB size. This allows for a small debug dump when the PC crashes.
"After reading your lead article, I changed the pagefile size on this XP install (c:) to "system managed size," and rebooted. I just checked the c: partition and it's showing the pagefile size as 3.67GB!
"Though I'm not concerned about the size, as c: is a 100GB partition, I am concerned about it causing fragmentation. I'm going to change it back to the 150 to 500MB size, as it has worked well for me in the past."
Fortunately, Windows lets you decide how big this file should be. Instead of selecting System managed size, select Custom size. Then enter the initial and maximum sizes and click Set.
A bigger question is how large to make this file.
Windows needs a pagefile on its boot partition that's large enough for a debugging file called a memory dump. A dump file, however, contains highly technical information that's useful only to system administrators and very advanced users.
A 2MB pagefile is enough for Windows to write out the minimum amount of information necessary to help an expert identify the problem. You can create a pagefile this small on your boot partition, and then add a larger pagefile on a different drive for code swapping to improve performance.
If you decide to make your boot-disk pagefile this small, you'll need to follow these steps:
Step 1. Press WindowsKey+R (Win+R) to open the Run dialog box.
Step 2. Vista only: Type SystemPropertiesAdvanced and press Enter.
Step 3. XP only: Type control sysdm.cpl and press Enter. Click the Advanced tab.
Step 4. In both Vista and XP, click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
Step 5. In the Startup and Recovery dialog box, choose Small memory dump (64KB) under Write debugging information. You can also change the path of Dump file to a partition other than c: to save space, if desired.
Step 6. Click OK, and then click Yes to acknowledge the warning on minimum pagefile size. Follow any screen prompts as you close the remaining dialog boxes.
If you are a systems administrator or advanced user, you can choose another option under Write debugging information, but you'll need a substantially larger pagefile to do the job. Microsoft's advice here is inconsistent. For example, a warning pops up in Windows to advise you that a kernel memory dump requires a pagefile of at least 200MB. But Knowledge Base article 307973 advises a much larger size.
For the full scoop on configuring your system for failure and recovery, I recommend reading Microsoft's entire KB article.
More ways to save space on your Windows drive
Doug's e-mail goes on to point out another way to save space on your system drive if you have multiple disks or partitions. On his triple-boot system, he's changed the location for system temp files to a single location. Here are the steps:
Step 1. Create a folder, perhaps named mytemp, on a partition or local drive that all versions of Windows on your computer can access.
Step 2. Press Win+R to open the Run dialog box.
Step 3. Vista only: Type SystemPropertiesAdvanced and press Enter.
Step 4. XP only: Type control sysdm.cpl and press Enter. Click the Advanced tab.
Step 5. In both Vista and XP, click Environment Variables at the bottom of the System Properties dialog box.
Step 6. In the list at the top of the dialog box, select the TEMP variable and click Edit.
Step 7. In the Variable value box, type the path to the new folder you created (for example, d:\mytemp). Click OK.
Step 8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for a different variable named TMP.
Step 9. If you have more than one version of Windows on your system, boot to the other version and repeat steps 1 through 8.
Reader Doug McRae will receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of his choice for sending tips we printed. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.
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