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How can I change the size of the pagefile?
John Savill
March 4, 1999
2 Min Read
A. We have previously discussed moving the pagefile (see Q. How do I move my pagefile? ), however it may be you just need to modify the size of an existing pagefile or add a new one as an addition to your existing one. Remember the more disk heads, the better performance so moving your page file to a RAID 0 disk arrangement would give excellent performance (RAID 0 is a stripe set without parity), while writing to a RAID 5 disk may adversely affect performance due to the extra parity information that needs to be written (RAID 5 is a stripe set with parity). There is little point adding a second pagefile to another partition if it is on the same physical disk, it would be better to just increase the size of the existing file, however 2 smaller pagefiles on different physical disks will give better results.
Start the System Control panel applet (start - settings - control panel - system)
Click the Performance tab
Under the Virtual Memory section it will tell the currently configured amount. Click Change.
A list of all partitions and the size of any pagefiles that exist will be listed next to them. To modify the size of an existing pagefile select the drive, e.g. c: and in the "Paging File Size for Selected Drive" enter a new Initial and Maximum size. Click Set when you have changed the values. The minimum size is 2MB but the total size of all pagefiles should be at least the size of memory + 11MB.
If you want to add an additional page file, select a drive that does not currently have a pagefile, e.g. d:, enter an initial and maximum and then click Set.
Once you have completed all changes click OK.
Click OK to the System control panel applet
You will have to reboot the machine for the change to take effect.
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