How To Properly Set The Windows 10 Paging File (2022)

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Lesson Summary:
This lesson can be found within my book 27 Amazing Windows 10 Performance Boosting Tips: A Complete Visual Guide For Beginners, Intermediates & Experts. The goal of this lesson is to teach the user How To Properly Set Or Disable The Windows 10 Paging File in 2020, This lesson is performed using a complete visual guide. First, we will assess the primary skill one user will obtain through the lesson. Second, a brief risk analysis of how the lesson can impact system performance and security. Finally, we conclude with learning why this particular lesson is important.

Why Learning How To Properly Set Or Disable The Windows 10 Paging File (2020) Is Important:

Is There A Standard For Setting The Paging File?

For early Microsoft Windows users, the Paging file in Windows operating systems often led to confusion. Nobody could quite figure out the optimal configuration. It is only within the last few years it professionals have nailed down an excellent method for optimizing the paging file. Microsoft generally does not want Windows users to go in and modify this. It’s not extremely risky to your machine; it’s just that it needs tailoring to your machine. Depending on how much Random Access Memory your computer possesses, the value of the paging file changes.

If your computer possesses 32 GB of memory or more, then it’s best to disable the paging file. For those of you who do not know what the paging file does, essentially it allows the computer to temporarily use your hard drive as a swap location for when you run out of memory. The swap space is excellent for computers with little to no memory because the computer won’t crash when it runs out. However, if you know anything about hard drives, and memory, you know that hard drives are significantly slower. So relying on the paging file is not ideal.

When Is It Safe To Disable The Paging File?

As the Windows operating system grew in memory usage, minimum memory requirement before disabling the paging file became higher. With Windows 7 you could safely disable the paging file with 16GB of memory. As discussed earlier, I don’t recommend disabling the paging file in Windows 10 unless you have at least 32 gigabytes of memory. You should also not disable it if you are running virtual machines on your Windows 10 environment. Virtual machines are incredibly memory-intensive. The second most logical option for the paging file is to let Windows manage it.

Windows managed paging file is a pretty good option, but Windows tends to be very conservative in its estimate. The third option is to use some simple math. First, you determine the total amount of memory on your machine. Next, you multiply that amount by 1024 and then multiply it a second time by 1.5. What we are getting with this formula is the maximum paging file for your computer system. The formula is 150% of the current maximum system memory.

[jessycruz]

I love that I go to a different video and almost everyone has a different paging file configurations. Lol!

[hollowstare]

Thank you very clear and easy to follow. How a tutorial/guide should go.

[truthfilterforyoutube]

This way of setting up a paging file is for people who don't have enough ram. In essence he is using the hard disk as ram. way slower than your ram..by at least 10x. don't do this if you have lots of actual ram. Performance will drop. Your better of decreasing the size of the paging file to about 200MB. That way you can still generate a crash dump file....but otherwise windows is using ram rather than disk.

[wjamyers]

this is fine with such low amount of memory, but using 96 GB for my 64 GB system seems excessive to me. What do you recommend for systems with lots of RAM?

[parania]

This is good advice, but ONLY for a machine with far too little physical memory to be practical with a modern OS; such as in the example shown here. The page file should never be set to zero of course, or you risk losing crash dumps and having older software misbehave, but in my experience 2048MB is the absolute maximum you should consider for a system with 16GB+ of physical memory; and closer to 500MB if you know that all the software/games you run will only dip into the page file when memory is filled, like they are supposed to. Too large a page file will invite many programs to utilize that first thinking that they are being helpful, leaving tons of your MUCH faster physical memory sitting idle and unable to do it's job.

[jerzyfaszowicz]

calculations gave me 24, 576 but recommended states 2923 should I go more? I have a 2, 5TB hard drive

[zaruthousgamingmusicplayer]

Everyone making the same mistake Initial size should be lowest not the same

[tharindurathnayake]

What if we have larger amount of Ram? Like 12 or 16 GB ?

[nathaneldanel]

6144 was already allocated when "automatically" was checked though?

[slicker]

Thank you for providing very clear instructions - appreciated - I am running X-Plane 11 (flight simulator) on a Win10 machine. The OS and XP11 run on separate SSD's. I also have additional SSD's for Ortho scenery etc. I have set the page file on the OS SSD according to your instructions and have a question. Some say it is beneficial to use a different SSD for the page file (i.e. if possible not the one used for the OS or Flight Sim software). Do you know if there is any benefit in choosing a specific SSD and if so, which would be the best SSD for me to use given that I have more SSD's in my machine.

[umang]

Is there any kind of disadvantage of this for playing high graphics games?

[markej]

What a great teaching vid! Your instructions are spot on and made it easy to change this important setting. Hopefully this will overcome my pausing problem.

[JobzenPadayattil]

Hey sir Please Help!

i’m using python and it’s showing error “paging file too small”

i followed video and still it doesn’t solve it
any other ideas?

[buronanmertua]

before im using this method, my FH4 always crash, thank u sir

[RifatErdemSahin]

If i got a raid 0 drive should i disable it as it is risky ?

[lydiasmith]

I never understood the sum thank you very clear understood perfectly 😁

[AMDRyzenEnthusiastGroup]

It should really be noted that if you have 16GB or more of RAM, this is terrible math to use. Nobody needs to be setting their pagefile to 25000+ MB's... (25 GB's...)

[RainWalking]

So why would a 32GB system need 48GB of a page file?

[igorradzik]

if i have 2 disks, do i set it to both?

[JakeAikens]

I have 16GB of memory. You're telling me my page file should be 25 gigs?!