How to increase the paging file in Windows 7

In the far 90s, when Microsoft was only groping for promising directions for the development of its operating systems, one of the developers proposed a software solution designed to improve the system performance with a small amount of RAM. Soon it turned out that this also provides additional benefits for programmers.

It was a time when the RAM modules were expensive, and the owners of computers with 256 MB were negligible. Modern users can not imagine how it is - to fight for every megabyte of memory, to disable half of the services of the system, to look for a way to increase the paging file by writing special commands to configuration files. Although now it seems a bit wild, however, the need to independently understand the operation of the operating system and programs helped users of that time master the computer hardware more thoroughly.

But back to the mechanism of working with memory, proposed by Microsoft. When creating a new software product, the programmer had to take into account a number of factors: an existing set of processor instructions; The environment in which the program will run; Features of the hardware of the computer, etc. For example, direct instructions to the program to use the commands of the AMD 3DNow processors! Will lead to its inoperability on Intel chips, which is highly undesirable. Also, it was necessary to know exactly whether there was a sound card in the computer and how to work with it. The program must determine exactly how much RAM is available. And since the configurations of computers are different, this caused difficulties with programming. With the advent of Windows 95, these issues were resolved, because the application interacted with the hardware through the operating system, and not directly. One of the innovations of the system was the virtual memory mechanism . He meant creating a file on the hard disk of the swap file, in which those parts of the program code were written that were rarely used in this session and did not require permanent presence in RAM. On the computer could be at least 4, at least 128 MB - the program "saw" the amount that they needed, at least 3 GB. The missing volume was provided by the swap file. The speed of work, of course, fell, but there were more advantages.

This solution proved to be so convenient that it survived to Win 7, it's no wonder that the global network often asks "how to increase the swap file on windows 7". Since the advent of the systems, the virtual memory technology has been seriously refined. In most cases, there is no need to understand how to increase the swap file. While the computer has up to 6 GB of memory, you do not need to configure anything, or you can trust the parameters to be set by the system.

However, sometimes intervention is required. It is logical that the more memory, the smaller the paging file should be, however, this condition is not met. For systems with 4 GB of memory, paging also occupies 4 GB on the disk, which is wasteful. Still, the answer to the question "how to increase the swap file" is pretty simple: set the desired values yourself. To do this, open the properties "My Computer" and in the additional parameters choose "Speed". In the "Advanced" window, you can both reduce and increase the swap file of windows 7. In some cases it is useful to completely disallow its use, the expediency of this depends on the range of tasks and the available memory.

Recommendations for choosing the optimal value can be found at specialized forums, they can also specify how to increase the swap file. And, still, if the memory is not less than 4 GB, then the best way to understand the issue is to check the operation of the system independently with different settings. Most importantly: the minimum size should be the maximum - this will eliminate the possible fragmentation of the file and slightly speed up the work.