11th March 2002
A few of you have run into problems with the swap file / virtual memory on Windows 2000 and XP. Thank goodness Lockergnomaniac Michael Goddard decided to share a solution. "Recently, I 'locked down' my machine for security purposes. This included disabling the 'Guest' account, removing the 'Everyone' account from my C drive, and disabling file and printer sharing. Once this was done, I started to have 'PAGEFILE.SYS is not found' errors. Every time I set the page file size and rebooted, the setting would not take. The Everyone account MUST be added to the "PAGEFILE.SYS drive" and it MUST have Full Control in order for you to be able to change the settings." Allow me to put on my "mother" hat and remind you (once more) not to toy with settings you don't understand. Taken at face value, turning an option on or off could seriously impact your Windows experience. Furthermore, there are a few other things to keep in mind when you're "optimizing" virtual memory in NT- based operating systems: moving the pagefile to a second (IDE) drive can help system performance, but only if the drive is on a separate channel. You should also have no more than one pagefile per physical drive. Meaning, if you've partitioned C into D, E, F, and G, don't set a separate pagefile for each drive.