Will this affect performance? If you are asking this type of question, then I suspect that you are probably not very familiar with the memory management architecture of Windows, so this isn't really something you should be doing. Michael has provided steps on how to configure this if you want to.
In Windows, only the kernel sees physical memory All user mode applications (most of those processes you see listed in Task Manager) see "virtual memory" that's presented to them by the kernel. On a 32bit version of Windows, each application sees 4GB of address space. Each application sees its own *unique* 4GB of address space - the application believes that there is nothing else running on the system. Out of that 4GB of address space, the upper 2GB is reserved for the kernel, and the application itself is free to use the lower 2GB. Because each process has the same layout for reserved kernel space, this is actually shared between all processes. OK - so now the virtual memory manager needs to map all this memory to real physical memory. E.g. iexplore.exe uses bytes 0x00000001 -> 0x0000000F to store an image. The Windows VMM needs to store this somewhere in physical memory. It does so by using mapping tables. Now, what happens when you only have 1GB of physical RAM in your machine, but each application, thnking it has up to 2GB available, starts actually *using* all that virtual memory? The VMM runs out of physical memory to store all this stuff. So it moves some stuff to the page file. If you have no page file, nothing can be moved, and your applications will start crashing with out-of-memory exceptions (because the VMM will deny them memory allocations). If you system has plenty of physical RAM, then is no need for page file. If your machine doesn't, you need a page file to "fake" physical RAM. Cheers Ken > -----Original Message----- > From: paul cheuk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, 14 May 2008 11:16 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Why XP is doomed > > Dear Ken, > > How can I configure Windows to run without a page file? Will this > affect the performance ? > > Thanks. > > > Paul Cheuk. ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
