User:Rewood/Setting your Virtual Memory in Windows 2000

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So are you having problems with your computers speed? Are you looking for a way to increase the performance of your machine? Well here is a quick tip on one way to optimize your machines performance and possibly increase speed. Virtual Memory is basically a section of Hard Drive space that is used kind of like memory on your system. The system writes temporary information to this section as it is performing varying tasks. Windows generally sets the size of this sections maximum and minimum value to be different. This takes away from performance as the system is taking the time to inflate and shrink this section. Here is how you can set up your Virtual Memory to be optimized for your system.

First right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and click on Properties.

Next click on the Advanced Tab.

Then click on the Performance Options Button.

You should see a virtual memory section you now want to click on the Change Button.

You should now see an Initial Size and Maximum Size text box.

Now what you set these values at depends mainly on the size of your hard drive. Obviously the higher you set it the better. If you have a large drive (8 GB+) then i would suggest setting it at at least 1000 MB. In general you would like to set it at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM your computer has. You also want to MAKE SURE the initial and maximum values are set to the same value so that the file is not constantly shrinking and compressing itself. 4095 MB is currently the maximum possible.

Once you have the values you wish to change these to hit the Set Button and then OK.

    • Tech Note For More Experienced Users**

If you are running a system with more than one Hard Drive especially if they are on different IDE chains you could consider the following for an increased performance boost. When you are changing the values of the virtual memory you can also select which drive you would like the paging file to be held on. Putting the paging file on a different drive that the drive that holds your OS especially if it is on a different IDE chain can boost performance. Basically the paging file is being written and read from just like memory. So if this file is on a different drive it frees up that read and write time for your OS to perform its regular operations. Just a tid bit of info for those who like tweaking their systems.

      • Jason Doss***
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