Pagefile

What would be the Pros and Cons of not using/setting a pagefile for Windows XP? I'm currently using 1.5 gigs of ram. Would I see better performance in everyday tasks such as browsing the internet and startup or would there be a decline in the performance of games?

The pagefile is only used when you run out of real memory, so turning it off won't boost performance. All that will happen is if you're doing something memory intensive, instead of a graceful degradation in performance it will just give you a memory error.

I have 2gbs of ram, but i haven't turned off virtual memory, most likely due to laziness.

turn it off if you want to reclaim some disk space, and you're sure that you dont ever go over 1.5gb of memory usage.

pagefile setting to a fixed size like 1.5 of ur ram and on a fat16 partition

>>4
"FAT16"? OLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO IS IT STILL 1995!?

Seriously, putting the pagefile on a separate partition of your hard drive *reduces* performance and may shorten the life of your drive, because you're forcing the drive heads to thrash back and forwards between your swap partition and your system partition when it reads system files, work files, etc. The only way moving your pagefile off the system volume can increase performance is if you move it to another hard disk entirely.

>>5
That's why I always keep a few spare 1gig hard disks lying around.

Of course small hard disks also tend to be slow because they were made years ago, so it's not so great performancewise. But hey, I hardly ever max out my ram anyway.