quite a few q's... a new beast that's acting slow, pls help

1) i'm assuming that the pagefile.sys IS the virtual memory, right?

anyways, can u guys advise me on the best thing i should do? my machine's an ASUS G1 with 2gb of ram, and it currently has D drive (another partition of the hard drive) as pagefile (2048-4096). i read the thread debating wether it's better to have it on D or C, and basically i wonna move back to C cuz as u guys said it makes no difference, and since my C drive is in NTFS format while D is in FAT32 i THINK it MIGHT be quicker (to defrag, at least) to move the pagefile back to C (btw, is 2048-4096 enough? or is it an overkill even?), but when i tried to set it it says that there's already a pagefile.sys on C and asks if i wonna overwrite it... is it ok for me to do so?

also, i have a 2gb SD card (50x speed)... am thinking to actually use THAT as virtual memory instead of the hard drive (5400rpm)... is that a smart move? though i can easily use 2048-4096 on both C/D drives the SD card only has 18xx as MAX...

so... any suggestions?

2) would this actually have ANYTHING to do with why my CSS takes like 2 mins to load? i mean, it IS pretty much a brand new system with good processor and RAM, why is it taking so long? (i've used the STEAM program to defrag cuz the stupid xp defragger doesn't seem to be able to defrag it... everytime i defrag it it still looks messy as hell... using auslogics tells me that it's 18% fragmented but no matter how many times i tell it to defrag it stays at 18%)... i also used the pagefile defragger to defrag it but it still takes soooooooo long to load CSS... given that it's such a new (and good) machine it's somewhat disappointing...

again, any suggestions pls?

thanks!

 

If you like the 2GB SD card don't put the pagefile one it, it will be dead in several months, and may not be fast enough. On my desktop I use 768MB of pagefile and have 512MB of DDR-400MHz, so 2GB-4GB for you would be a little overkill. I think that the HDD rotational speed is the killer here, 5400RPM is a little slow for a gaming machine, not sure why Asus didn't give the G1 a 7200RPM drive. The only time moving the pagefile would make a difference is moving onto another drive, not another partition as you already heard.

As for 2 minutes to load, that is a long time. If your on battery, see if you get better performace on AC (on battery, your CPU is clocked down to 1GHz). My system takes two minutes to load CSS, and it is three years old, so it should not be happening to you.

If the windows defragger does nothing, try a third party one, but 18% fragmented already? That is a little odd. Check to see if that figure is correct.

 

I concur. Put it on the C:, and I'd set it to 512MB, and let it grow up to 2GB. If you're running into a gig of swap your system will be dead on it's feet anyway. I have no clue about CSS, as I refuse to put that crapware steam on my machine.

 

thanks guys for the input

pagefile - i guess i'll put it on C then. but when i tried, it says that there's already a pagefile.sys on C (it's currently on D, so i find that weird... or is it me that's weird ) and asks if i wonna replace it. i CAN just cancel the pagefile on D, set it on C and replace the pagefile currently on C with no problems, right?

CSS - well it runs like heaven ONCE i'm in it (it's on AC power btw), it just takes so long for it to load for some reason... well i dunno if it's CSS or steam, but when i double clicked on the CSS icon on desktop, for a good 30-40 secs nothing appears, THEN the steam thing comes in telling me that i'm currently logging into their network...

hmm... although i'm dreading it, seems like i need to reformat the stupid thing? maybe i should try defragging it more first, but can't decide if i should use diskeeper or O&O... or would that even not solve the problem?

thanks again

 

oh btw just curious, which defragging programs do u guys use?

 

Almost.
Virtual memory is *all* the memory that the OS can address. That is, it is the combination of the pagefile (which is indeed pagefile.sys) and the physical RAM.

You won't see a big performance difference from placing the pagefile on either C: or D:, unless they're separate harddrives.
However, one little quirk of Windows is that it usually insists on having a pagefile on C: no matter what you do. So if you don't want a pagefile on C:, you should create one and set it to 64MB or something, and then create the "main" pagefile on D:

If both are ok with you, it's easier to keep the pagefile on C: which will make Windows happy.
(And yeah, it should be safe to overwrite the pagefile)

As for CSS, one factor is most likely fragmentation of the Steam data files. Try shutting down Steam and see if you can defrag then.
Another factor is that Steam can just be ridiculously slow, partly because it wants to confirm everything with Valve's servers.

 

awesome. i learn a new thing a day

thanks for the reply. i replaced the pagefile.sys onto C without any problems. the pagefile defrag took a LOT quicker also (since i guess cuz the pagefile was previously on D and D is FAT32 where C's NTFS)

regarding CSS, u're absolutely right. i GUESS it took that long to load that time cuz i haven't played for a 2 weeks or so and it was probably just doing updates and stuff... opening it last night didn't take AS long (still took a good 20-30 secs though :/ ) so wot u said (confirmation with servers) makes absolute perfect sense...

charr, regarding the fragmentation, i dunno wot happened (most probably my memory's fault ) but ya, 8% fragmentation seemed to be my absolute minimum for a while (8% according to auslogics, and i defragged 3 times in a row all with 8% fragmentation at the end) last night... then i redid the pagefile onto C drive, defragged the pagefile, moved some media files from C to D drive, restarted the comp and defragged again, this time all of a sudden fragmentation went down to 0.1% (though by using both xp defragger to do analysis and auslogics for the 'visual' state of the files they are still everywhere (ie. not all packed in front of the drive with no space in between), with a mid sized chunk in the middle and a small sized chunk near the end...) this is ok, right? should i just stick with xp and auslogics to defrag or do u guys think i should use a 3rd party software?

thanks again!

 

sorry a new question regarding virtual memory...

after reading a few threads debating regarding standby/hibernate/shut down, i've decided to hibernate my laptop for the majority of the time.

BUT (this has happened 3 times out of the past week already) sometimes i get this 'out of virtual memory' warning when i wonna hibernate (since i think hibernation's the only mode that writes a LOT of crap on HD/RAM, right?), then it will just refuse hibernating (i don't have ANY applications open then,) and would just go to standby instead of hibernating when i ask it to, so all 3 times i would have to end up shutting down instead of hibernating... but i already have 2gb ram and assigned a FURTHER 2-4gb of virtual ram onto drive C... why is this happening??

any suggestions? thanks!

 

bumpateebump

 

if i am not mistaken it is a bug in windows xp media. a fix is downloadable from the windows website. not have the link for you right at the moment.

 

hi there. thanks for the reply
i went to search for the fix at ms's support website and got this
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327158/en-us
doesn't seem to solve my problem...
can u pls provide the link? thanks