Microsoft Windows uses a feature called the ‘Paging File’ to try and help speed up system performance on P.C’s that are short of physical memory. This Paging File is basically an area of hard drive spave that is used as temporary store for information when the main system RAM is full, Windows will store data that is currently un-needed in this file, and then retrieve it when necessary and for this reason it often goes by the name of ‘Virtual Memory’
For those trying to improve system performance the paging file can be an awkward thing to deal with as by definition it is operational as soon as Windows is booted, which makes it difficult to work with. However, one of the things that can be done to improve the performance of the paging file is to move it a seperate physical hard drive to that used by Windows itself. moving the paging file is simply a matter of following the instructions below:
- Click the ‘Start‘ button and select the option for the ‘Control Panel‘.
- Open the ‘System‘ applet and select the ‘Advanced‘ tab.
- Next click on ‘Settings‘ under ‘Performance‘ and select the ‘Advanced‘ tab.
- Click on ‘Change‘ and the Virtual Memory dialog box will be displayed.
- You can change the location of the paging file by selecting the letter that represents the hard disk you want to use.
Note – You must use a differenet physical disk drive to the drive where your Windows directory is stored for optimal performance. Using a different partition of the same physical drive will have little effect if any.