Maximum PC

So for the moment I've moved my page file to a 6gb/s 7200RPM drive. I haven't noticed anything, and don't necessarily expect to. Thanks all for the replies, I'll report back if I do. I'm still not really clear on the factual answer to the question(s)..I hope MPC does run a blurb on it someday, what with 16gb of Ram well under $200, and fast storage being pretty expensive compared to the insanely inexpensive price per TB of platter drives. Either way, my system is smoking fast and I haven't touched a single OC knob or slider..yet

The paging file is internal to the memory manager. No application can read from or write to it.

I don't have any strong opinions on the page file (I usually just let Windows do its thing) but I do have an opinion on hiberfil.sys-on a desktop, turn off hibernation and nuke that sucker. I'm a fan of doing full shutdowns.

Why nuke the hibernate feature?

Thanks for the reply. I guess that I'll just have to try it out and see how it works for me. Some of my projects have fairly large datasets, and I suspect that I might see from benefit from it. Hard to say though.

You also may want to try having the page file on another drive.

Food for thought: I found this article some time ago looking to configure the page file correctly. It deals with Windows XP and the task manager however, I sure it still applies to Vista and 7 as well since it is still similar. The information is pretty solid as it uses the task manager's monitoring abilities and set the page file according to usage. This is the link. I do want to note that the 1.5x your physical ram was pretty solid advice during the 32-bit XP days. Having 1 gig of RAM when you have multiple programs that were RAM hungry, you would need a 2-3 gig page file. Even with a few programs up, I have ~2 gigs still free out of 8 and ~4 gigs are on standby.

Currently with 8 gigs or more becoming very common, you can easily have everything in RAM. SMP folding w/bigadv only used 1 gig of RAM as well as the largest game I could find as well. However, other programs may not be as forgiving and stream data they need off the hard disk. Theoretically, you don't even need one (been over this) but it is wise to have some sort of page file. Currently, I have a 500MB page file and have no issues (yet).

Edit: Now I've set up a 1.5 gig page file.

Because you like long boot times?

So, how much longer is boot time (running Win 7) off of an SSD as opposed to reading the hibernate file off of a platter drive??

Why does that question matter?

Well, if the times are comparable, why would I want to enable the hibernate feature and waste space on the SSD (along of course with having another useless service enabled all the time which might conflict with something else)? Basically, most of the 'experts' all say to let windows manage itself; that the microsoft engineers know better than I do. Well, historically, that hasn't always been true, and windows has been a mess; wasting system resources, memory and storage space, enabling services that will never be used, having their programs running in the background even if we never use them (not to mention designing windows to allow other outside developers to do the same and hiding that fact from users, making us think our computers are old, slow, and out of date so we'll buy new ones along of course with another copy of windows and office and god only knows what other software we'd be wasting our money on), the list just goes on and on. It's my computer, I should get to decide what runs on it and what's installed on it, and how it works. If it's going to waste multi gigabytes of valuable space on my hard disk or ssd, I want to know why, and if it's worth it, not whether microsoft thinks I should have it (microsoft thinks I should buy new versions of all their software ever time they develop them, another prime example of them not knowing what's best for the rest of us). A perfect example is the system restore feature; I haven't needed it since it was introduced, and I don't want to use it now. File indexing was another; of course, now that I'm going to use an ssd, that might change, but I want to explore all the opinions first, and you bet I'll be watching to see how my two new systems work out with similar installations.