Hasta La Gadget!

As a tech writer, I regularly cringe at all the bad tweaking advice out there, and disabling the system pagefile is often a source of contention among geeks. Let’s examine some of the pagefile myths and debunk them once and for all.

What is a Pagefile and How Do I Adjust It?

Before we get into the details, let’s review what the pagefile actually does. When your system runs low on RAM because an application like Firefox is taking too much memory, Windows moves the least used “pages” of memory out to a hidden file named pagefile.sys in the root of one of your drives to free up more RAM for the applications you are actually using. What this actually means to you is that if you’ve had an application minimized for a while, and you are heavily using other applications, Windows is going to move some of the memory from the minimized application to the pagefile since it’s not being accessed recently. This can often cause restoring that application to take a little longer, and your hard drive may grind for a bit.

If you want to take a look at your own pagefile settings, launch sysdm.cpl from the Start menu search or run box (Win+R) and navigate to Advanced –> Settings –> Advanced –> Change. From this screen you can change the paging file size (see image above), set the system to not use a paging file at all, or just leave it up to Windows to deal with—which is what I’d recommend in most cases.

Why Do People Say We Should Disable It?

Look at any tweaking site anywhere, and you’ll receive many different opinions on how to deal with the pagefile—some sites will tell you to make it huge, others will tell you to completely disable it. The logic goes something like this: Windows is inefficient at using the pagefile, and if you have plenty of memory you should just disable it since RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive. By disabling it, you are forcing Windows to keep everything in much faster RAM all the time.

The problem with this logic is that it only really affects a single scenario: switching to an open application that you haven’t used in a while won’t ever grind the hard drive when the pagefile is disabled. It’s not going to actually make your PC faster, since Windows will never page the application you are currently working with anyway.

Disabling the Pagefile Can Lead to System Problems

The big problem with disabling your pagefile is that once you’ve exhausted the available RAM, your apps are going to start crashing, since there’s no virtual memory for Windows to allocate—and worst case, your actual system will crash or become very unstable. When that application crashes, it’s going down hard—there’s no time to save your work or do anything else.

In addition to applications crashing anytime you run up against the memory limit, you’ll also come across a lot of applications that simply won’t run properly if the pagefile is disabled. For instance, you really won’t want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. You’ll also notice some other strange, indefinable behavior when your pagefile is disabled—in my experience, a lot of things just don’t always work right.

Less Space for File Buffers and SuperFetch

If you’ve got plenty of RAM in your PC, and your workload really isn’t that huge, you may never run into application crashing errors with the pagefile disabled, but you’re also taking away from memory that Windows could be using for read and write caching for your actual documents and other files. If your drive is spending a lot of time thrashing, you might want to consider increasing the amount of memory Windows uses for the filesystem cache, rather than disabling the pagefile.

Windows 7 includes a file caching mechanism called SuperFetch that caches the most frequently accessed application files in RAM so your applications will open more quickly. It’s one of the many reasons why Windows 7 feels so much more “snappy” than previous versions—and disabling the pagefile takes away RAM that Windows could be using for caching. Note: SuperFetch was actually introduced in Windows Vista.

Put the Pagefile on a Different Drive, Not Partition

The next piece of bad advice that you’ll see or hear from would-be system tweakers is to create a separate partition for your pagefile-which is generally pointless when the partition is on the same hard drive. What you should actually do is move your pagefile to a completely different physical drive to split up the workload.

What Size should my Pagefile Be?

Seems like every IT guy I’ve ever talked to has stated the “fact” that your pagefile needs to be 1.5 to 2x your physical RAM—so if you have a 4GB system, you should have an 8GB pagefile. The problem with this logic is that if you are opening 12 GB worth of in-use applications, your system is going to be extremely slow, and your hard drive is going to grind to the point where your PC will be fairly unusable. You simply will not increase or decrease performance by having a gigantic pagefile; you’ll just use up more drive space.

Mark Russinovich, the well-known Windows expert and author of the Sysinternals tools, says that if you want to optimize your pagefile size to fit your actual needs, you should follow a much different formula: The Minimum should be Peak Commit – Physical RAM, and the Maximum should be double that.

For example, if your system has 4GB of RAM and your peak memory usage was 5GB (including virtual memory), you should set your pagefile to at least 1GB and the maximum as 2GB to give you a buffer to keep you safe in case a RAM-hungry application needs it. If you have 8GB of RAM and a max 3GB of memory usage, you should still have a pagefile, but you would probably be fine with a 1 GB size. Note: If your system is configured for crash dumps you’ll need to have a larger pagefile or Windows won’t be able to write out the process memory in the event of a crash—though it’s not very useful for most end-users.

The other size-related advice is to set the minimum and maximum size as the same so you won’t have to deal with fragmentation if Windows increases the size of the pagefile. This advice is rather silly, considering that most defrag software will defragment the pagefile even if Windows increases the size, which doesn’t happen very often.

The Bottom Line: Should You Disable It?

As we’ve seen, the only tangible benefit of disabling the pagefile is that restoring minimized applications you haven’t used in a while is going to be faster. This comes at the price of not being able to actually use all your RAM for fear of your applications crashing and burning once you hit the limit, and experiencing a lot of weird system issues in certain applications.

The vast majority of users should never disable the pagefile or mess with the pagefile settings—just let Windows deal with the pagefile and use the available RAM for file caching, processes, and Superfetch. If you really want to speed up your PC, your best options are these:

• Upgrade your RAM.
• Clean off the crapware—the biggest cause of system slowdown.
• Switch to Microsoft Security Essentials and stop paying for bloated Windows security packages.
• Windows 7 handles multi-tasking much better than Windows XP did.

On my Windows 7 system with 6GB of RAM and a Windows-managed pagefile, every application opens quickly, and even the applications I haven’t used in a while still open almost instantaneously. I’m regularly running it up to 80-90% RAM usage, with dozens of application windows open, and I don’t see a slowdown anywhere.

If you want to read more extremely detailed information about how virtual memory and your pagefile really work, be sure to check out Mark Russinovich’s article on the subject, which is where much of this information was sourced.

Don’t agree with my conclusions? Voice your opinion in the comments, or even better—run some benchmarks to prove your point.

The How-To Geek has tested pagefile settings extensively and thinks everybody should just upgrade to Windows 7 already. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

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While last year’s CES didn’t blow us away in terms of gaming, we’ve got high hopes for 2010. Both Sony and Microsoft have new technologies right around the corner and we’re hoping to get to see a taste of each at the big show. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://ces.cnet.com/8301-31045_1-10414200-269.html” class=”origPostedBlog”2010 CES/a/p

Apple on Sunday apologized to customers for shipping delays of its new high-end iMac. Incidentally, many consumers have reported issues with Apple’s latest iMac, which some have speculated to be the cause of the delay.

Apple’s online store lists estimated shipping times of two weeks for both 27-inch iMac models. Delivery time for the two 21-inch iMacs is within 24 hours.

“The new iMac has been a huge hit and we are working hard to fulfill orders as quickly as possible,” an Apple spokesperson told CNET. “We apologize for any inconvenience or delay this may cause our customers.”

CNET’s Jim Dalrymple points out that customers have started a thread in Apple’s support forums which has surpassed 81 pages worth of comments and complaints about issues with the iMac’s display. Many report that their screens appear to be flickering.

Consumer reports of problems with the 27-inch iMac surfaced in late October. Dozens reported performance issues ranging from sluggish Flash playback to erratic hard-drive behavior.

Apple has not acknowledged issues with its latest iMac.

Have a problem with your iMac? Computerworld started a new website to track the 27-inch iMac’s problems. Report them there.

See Also:

• Review: Apple’s 27-inch iMac and Magic Mouse Make an Excellent …
• The 27-Inch iMac Is the New Apple TV
• Customers Complain New iMacs Plagued With Performance Problems …
• New iMacs Outperform Mac Pros in Benchmark Tests

Photo: Mike Calore/Wired.com

If you’ve seen the internet (or Giz) this weekend, you’ve heard about it: the “real Google phone” that “changes everything.” But before we get carried away, a counterpoint: Google isn’t magic. And the Nexus One isn’t a game-changer. Not yet.

And I don’t mean to say that I don’t understand what the Nexus One is, or what Google’s trying to do. Nor am I saying that Google plan for the Nexus One—to offer a different type of cellphone buying experience than US customers are accustomed to, and to provide a model for future Android handset—is a particularly bad one. I’m saying that I don’t get the hype: Google’s Nexus one is an interesting experiment, not some kind of heroically disruptive Google coup, as many people, changes everything”>including us, have implied. Consider the facts:

It’s an HTC Android handset. This means that on a material level, it’s barely more of a Google phone than the G1—which Google passively oversaw—or the Motorola Droid—which Google actively helped design. And hey, people remember: Google still isn’t a hardware company. Not even close.

The hardware isn’t revolutionary. It’s the third (at least) Snapdragon-powered Android phone we’ve heard about. It’s got a 5-megapixel camera. It’s got dual microphones, to help with noise reduction. It’s fairly thin. These are nice features for a new phone, but they’re more or less exactly what we’d expect HTC to be working on next.

It’s pretty much running Android 2.0. People are talking a lot about how Google had full control over the Nexus One user experience, and how it’s going to be unlike any other Android we’ve ever seen before. But we’ve seen other builds of 2.1, albiet covered in the Sense UI, leaked for the HTC Hero (spoiler: not that impressive), and combined with the early glimpses we’ve caught from spy shots, they give the feeling that 2.1 isn’t much of a step up from 2.0, which is what the Droid ships with, which, mind you, Motorola doesn’t seem to have touched almost at all. As far as I can tell, the Nexus One will have some pretty new UI flourishes, and maybe a few UX changes. Again: this is typical, paced progress, not a drastic overhaul.

The new business model isn’t really new. Even the most breathless commentary on the Nexus One admits that what it means is more important than what’s on its spec sheet. And yeah, it’ll be the first phone marketed as the Google phone, and Google’s sales strategy—to offer the device without contract first, and probably unlocked, with a (hardware limited—possibly just to T-Mobile, if you care about 3G) choice of carriers—is foreign to the US market. But it’s far from unheard of—you can buy unlocked phones at Best Buy, for God’s sake. Oh, and Nokia’s been handling their US smartphone releases like this for years. It hasn’t gone well.

Google doesn’t have superpowers. Using their unmatched internet superpowers, Google can do more to convince the general public that an expensive, unsubsidized phone is a good idea than Nokia, whose marketing efforts have been wimpy and ineffective. But they can’t do anything crazy, like give this thing away. They can sell it for cheap by relying on their own advertising network—or hell, their homepage—for advertising, as well as the massive press coverage they’re already getting, and selling it at little to no profit. To be able to match carriers’ prices, though, will be a stretch: A Verizon or a T-Mobile can absorb the cost of a phone in month-to-month fees and overage charges. What does Google have? Theoretical future Adsense revenue?

Even if what we see now is exactly what we’re going to get, the Nexus One is something worth paying attention to—it will be a way for Google to demonstrate what their vision for Android is without carrier interference. They’ll control the software experience on the phone; they’ll control how it’s updated; they’ll control what software is and isn’t allowed on it. And they could use it to convey an vision for Google Voice, in which Google supplies your number, your nonstandard calling rates and your texting allowance, while carriers simply supply a neutral, dumb and ultimately out-of-sight cellular connection. But even if that is what they’re doing—we don’t know!—the Nexus One is a first step. It’ll be an early product to guide the progress of an industry, not the product that’ll define it.

Whenever we talk about Google, we need to factor in a little windage. They’re buzzy, they’re huge, and they’ve thrown plenty of other industries curveballs before. This phone sits at the hype nexus (for lack of a better word) of Google Voice, Android, Google’s online services and HTC. For now, to say that the Nexus One has somehow changed everything is to buy into these company’s hype too earnestly, to ascribe to Google mystical qualities, and to take for granted a series of future actions that Google hasn’t even hinted at fulfilling yet. Apple isn’t the only company tech watchers recklessly project onto.

Or, to compress it to 140 characters or less: “The Google phone matters as much as Google makes it matter.” For now, people, calm down.