Windows – Why won’t Windows 7 record crash details when the paging file is separated from the operating systems drive, and can I do something about this

While this does not directly answer the question, I post this here just as a reminder of an alternative solution. For most virtual machine uses, you probably don't need every single component that Windows 7 comes with (e.g. Tablet PC, Windows Media Center). If you have access to your installation media or the image file, you can use the WAIK using the DISM tool tool if you're an advanced user, or consider a simpler tool like RT Se7en Lite, to slim the operating system down (if you're interested, you could also slipstream Windows Updates/Service Packs, unattended applications, etc).

This should result in a much smaller image, and a much "lighter" operating system (which definitely lessens the RAM it uses) depending on the components you remove.

Again though, this obviously does not apply for an installed & running version of Windows. There are definitely more optimizations that you can do afterwards, which is why I called this just an alternative solution. There are a wide variety of guides on the internet for post-installation optimizations.

First, you have a fundamental confusion about what virtual memory is. Virtual memory is something that looks like memory. It is not the same thing as a paging or swap file. (People got this confused because adjusting the paging file is the only virtual memory setting available in the standard Windows GUI, so people started thinking they were the same thing. They are not.)

Second, "paged memory" is memory that is part of the paged pool. You want as much of your memory to be paged as possible because paged memory can be managed flexibly. Only very few things need to be non-paged.

The non-paged pool contains only memory that cannot be paged because it must remain locked in physical memory. Only data that might be needed in a context in which paging is not possible counts towards the non-paged pool. (For example, the buffers used to communicate with the hard drive controller obviously cannot be paged!) Less confusing terms would be "pageable" and "non-pageable".

Second: The vast majority of your memory is used. The only memory that's not being used is memory that's free. The usage percentage is the percentage of memory used for essential purposes. It's really only helpful to help you measure whether you might need more memory or whether memory demand is unusual. It's saying you don't need more memory and Windows doesn't need most of the memory you have, but it's using it to improve performance.

That's how it should be.

There are only two rational reasons to move your page file from an SSD to a hard drive. One would be if you need the space on your SSD. The other would be if you have an older SSD with very limited write lifetime. There's really no reason not to keep a page file on a modern SSD if you have the space. That way, if you do encounter unusually high memory demand, performance won't drop as much as it would if it had to write to a hard drive.