Windows – Guide for Setting Up RAMDisk for Pagefile.sys

pagefileramdiskwindowswindows 7windows xp

I was talking with a friend the other day about Windows in general and I mentioned that there is, unfortunately no way (that I was aware of) to disable the page file within Windows. Regardless of the size of your RAM, there was always going to be pagefile.sys.

If you're like me, you don't want your memory paged on your HD if there really is no need for it. He offered the brilliant suggestion I had never considered– create a RAM Drive and set the page file to RAM Drive.

Of course, as he and I were both aware, I'm sure this has been done before. I've never created a RAM Disk before? Has anyone in the SU community ever done this and, if so, have a link to a good walkthrough on how to do this?

Best Answer

You can easily disable the page file. Jeff Atwood blogged about disabling it and the consequences. In any case, moving it to a RAMdisk is the worst thing you could do with it, since the page file is for storing stuff that already doesn't fit in memory. Reserving memory for a RAMDisk is going to only make more data get paged out, which will in turn require a larger paging file and RAMDisk, which will in turn leave less memory available, which will in turn page out more mem-- You can see where this is going.

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