Speed up your computer Part 2/4: The Page File

Posted by: wizardcreations on: November 7, 2007

• In: computer advice
• 4 Comments

Use little or no money
Giving your computer a little turbo boost if its lost its spark over the years is easy with some basic maintenance and a little money. Those that spend are going to get the best performance but for those that don’t want to spend anything extra will still see a good performance gain provided you don’t already do what I’ve shown(and about to show).

Increasing the page file
Changing the way the page file operates and increasing its size will help your performance. It will save CPU(central processing unit, the brain of the computer) recources and your computer will have more room for windows to store system files which are important to running programs.

The page file explained
The page file is a section on your hard disk that has been reserved to act as though it where RAM(Random Access Memory), RAM is your computers memory that handles data that is sent to and from the CPU.

 Take this example, you type a letter on Microsoft word and this data gets sent through the keyboard to your computer. The CPU will need to process this data and send instructions to the monitor to display this new letter, the only problem is the keyboards language is different from the CPU’s and the monitors language is different as-well, how to they understand each other? well that’s where the RAM comes in, it takes the data between and sorts it into a set of instructions that the CPU and other input(keyboard) and output(monitor) devices can understand. So essentially the more memory you have the more operations your computer can do at once.

The problem with the page file
So the page file acts as RAM, Great i don’t have to upgrade my computer! unfortunatly this isnt the case the page file is on the hard drive and compared to the speed of the memory the page file is like a 91 year old with stilts, it just isn’t near as fast as the ram and depending on the page file to give you permanent performance increase wont happen. Increasing the page file if you are experiencing slowness on your computer is really only a temporary action before buying extra memory.

So how do i do it?
Right so now we know more about the page file we can begin to increase the page file. I have made a short video on how to do this below. I am showing you how to do this on windows vista but their is basically no difference between doing this on vista and on xp.  

Ok so i have included a youtube version of my video. This may be too small so i have included a download from my website www.wizardcreations.co.uk below. just right-click the link below and select “save as” to download.

www.wizardcreations.co.uk/PageFileFinal.wmv

Thank you for looking at my post.

Tags: computer advice, Computer Help, Computers, email, internet, PC, ram, readyboost, Technology, vista help, windows vista, windows xp, xp help