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I have 8GB of memory on my machine, running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I put my laptop to sleep and then woke it up. As it was coming back to life I noticed a lot of activity reads and writes from/to the pagefile.sys.

Task manager only showed 4GB of used memory, which left me with approx. 4GB free. Why would it be needing the page file and is there a way to prevent it from writing to the page file?

One way, I see is to disable the paging file, which should work as long as the 8GB of memory is sufficient for all work activities. However, when doing this I have run into the OS giving me occasional popups indicating that memory is low.

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  • Did this activity decrease after the laptop had been running for a few minutes? Mar 1, 2012 at 14:23
  • It decreases, but when I open up Visual Studio or run an app, it gets busy again now primarily reading from the page file.
    – Elan
    Mar 1, 2012 at 15:58

1 Answer 1

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Why would it be needing the page file

Windows aggressively puts unused elements of the kernel etc. out of the RAM in order to ahve as much free as possibl e when you start an application. SImple common sense -it assumes you will want the RAM or it coudl be used for examlpe as disc cache.

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  • I bought max. memory that my laptop would take, to increase performance and minimize/avoid paging... :)
    – Elan
    Mar 1, 2012 at 15:59
  • Those stuff paged out are ofte n"laong time nuused parts of the kernel". It makes sense to move those out when not used for al ong time as they are very unlikelöy to be used. It is better to keep teh memroy for caching the stuff you really access and use.
    – TomTom
    Mar 1, 2012 at 16:34

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