XP madness with pagefile allocation

[Guest Monolithix]

Just fyi: this has been picked up on eeeuser already

As some of you know i run XP on my EEE. The basic install was around 3gb after windows update had finished, which seemed high but to be honest, i have no benchmark to check it by. I moved my pagefile to my 8GB SDHC (which stays there permanently) and while i had an incling something was amiss, after being mega busy at uni though no more of it.

Chatting with leonxki earlier i actually did some poking around, looked for pagefile.sys on the SD with no luck, a quick search located it on C:! All 1.5GB of it :s

Turns out XP will let you set the pagefile to an external drive, but won't *actually* use it. 1: Thats stupid, 2: I'm capable of sorting my pagefile, 3: thats stupid. Sigh

After having to disable it, reboot, enable it, it removed the 1.5GB madness and is now filling the 512MB i've set it too.

What the hell MS?

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Ditto with Vista btw!

P

[Guest Dade]

is there no way of fudging XP so that it doesn't classify the SD card as a removable storage card ?

[Guest leonxki]

There is a very long winded way of doing it on google. But, the link the I read still said that the applications that do not install onto the removable storage, still wont install, for example visual c++ express. Currently experimenting with a 256MB swap, and it's doing ok :(

[Guest Monolithix]

Theres a guide on eeeuser too. It seems you basically have to re-write the driver and bodge the registry, long winded and convoluted. Saving that GB on the SSD was enough for me. Still annoying though...

[Guest blacklabelsk8erX]

I don't own an eee yet. I'd like to get one. But I do share the limited storage space you all have. My system is a 8 year old Dell with a 6GB hdd.

A good thing to do to free up a bit more space in XP is to delete all the uninstall info for the updates. All the hidden folders in C:\WINDOWS and then also deleting the Windows Update download cache in C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download. I dunno if you're all working with fancy NLite'd XP installs or whatnot. Might not apply to you. By keeping these folders cleared out, I have about a 1.5GB fully updated XP install which I feel is pretty decent.

[Guest DrScouse]

There is a very long winded way of doing it on google

Not really, took me less than 5 minutes.. sdhc now showing as fixed disk...

However, you can still not move the pagefile to it, whatever you do, despite it saying in the PF advanced proterties that it is not on C, it actually is!!!

Ive been trying for 2 days now to fix it, but I dont think its gonna happen...

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14292

You can also move the dllcache which is a least 200mb to the card, via reg tweak...

Ive moved the entire DOcs&settings to the card to, so all personal stuff, and new user accounts will store all temp files, temp internet fales, cookies, favourites, applicaiton data etc etc...

Edited January 18, 2008 by DrScouse

[Guest hippotech]

Hi all,

Am I missing something here <_<

Why not run without a swap file. Mine has been running fine for a while now. Admittedly I have upgraded the RAM to 2Gb but this cost only £30....probably a lot less in dollars....and I haven't had any issues whatsoever.

Hippo

Edited January 19, 2008 by hippotech

[Guest EdinKali]

Hi all,

Am I missing something here <_<

Why not run without a swap file. Mine has been running fine for a while now. Admittedly I have upgraded the RAM to 2Gb but this cost only £30....probably a lot less in dollars....and I haven't had any issues whatsoever.

Hippo

No swap file here either even with only 512M of RAM and it is still quite peppy. No issues so far.