If your system has begun to slow down after several week's of usage, there are couple of minor changes you can make to your computer settings that will help increase the performance of your system. Tweaking the speed of windows is essential to get the maximum performance for your computer. Even on a fast hardcore computer, if the settings are incorrect, the computer will perform slowly.
Virtual memory for your system is hard drive space used by microsoft windows when it fills up the physical memory ( i mean your ram ). Let's say you have a system that has 128MB of RAM and you're running several applications at once that might need a total of 256MB of memory. Windows will fill up the 128MB and then use the free space on the hard drive to store the rest. This is called the Page files or Virtual memory and Windows will increase and decrease the size of this file as needed. loading in to disk takes much longer than loading in to a physical memory, so when Windows uses the paging file, your systems performance degrades.
That's why we always hear people asking if there is enough physical memory, because the more RAM you have, the better your system's performance will be. However, we can tweak the virtual memory settings also so that the paging file does not get fragmented and so that Windows does not have to grow or shrink the size of the paging file, both of which will cause the system to slow down, especially on older machines.( pentium 1 , pentium 11 , etc )
By default, Mircosoft Windows uses the boot partition (the partition of your windows operating system files) and it is recommended to set the size to 1.5 times the amount of physical memory that you have. to change your virtual memory settings, go to Start, Control Panel and click on System. Click on the Advanced tab and under the Performance box, click Settings.On the Performance dialog, click on Advanced tab and then click Change under the Virtual Memory heading. you will get your virtual memory settings now!
To get the best performance in your pc it is best to create a page file on a different partition than your primary boot partition (the drive that contains your windows operating system, which is usually the C drive) and to also create it on a separate hard disk. In this way, Windows can handle more Input/output requests because the paging file will not have to compete with the system folder that needs to be constantly accessed as microsoft windows runs. The only problem with completely moving the paging file off the boot partition is that microsoft windows uses the page file to write out debug information in case your computer crashes with blue screen of death error. This is important for systems that have critical data, but for an average computer user, this is not going to be a big deal. If you get the blue screen of death, it's not an easy task at all to get to read the file and even if you can, it can be quite complicated. But if you have enough disk space, then you can leave the paging file there.
So the best option is to create on paging file on the primary boot partition that will take care in case of a crash and create another paging file on a separate partition on a separate hard drive preferably. If you have only one hard drive on your computer, then just create another paging file on another partition. Microsoft windows automatically uses the paging file that is on the less accessed partition using its internal algorithm. even more ideal would be if you could put the paging file in it's own partition with no other data. This guarantees that the paging file will never become fragmented and the performance will be better. If it's on a drive that has other computer data and the paging file must be expanded, and if there is other data in the way, the file will become fragmented. to reduce fragmentation of the paging file is to set the initial and maximum sizes to the same number. What this does is ensure that the file does not grow or shrink and therefore will not fragment. However, you should defragment your hard drive before doing this to ensure the paging file is all together on the hard disk.
So if you have only one system partition, set the initial and maximum sizes to 1.5 times the amount of physical memory you have. If you have more than one disk partition, select the boot partition and set the initial and max to 250MB. The reason for this is because it's better to create another paging file on the other partition and create one paging file on the boot partition that's just big enough for the mini dump file, which is 250MB. On your second disk partition, select Custom Size and set the initial and maximum values to 1.5 times the amount of physical memory you have. You can determine the amount of memory you have by going to Start, Control Panel, and click System. You'll see the amount of physical memory at the bottom right. thats all for now! i am planning to write another article with more info next time. thanks for reading my article.
