Fixing your page file size settings. Microsoft thinks you should know this already.

I thought I had a virus. Or spyware. Or something. My hot rod Dell laptop went to the dumps in performance. I couldn’t even type my article, the hard disk was sweating from working so hard. It turns out that the latest XP update reset my page file settings. It turned off the “system managed” page file and set it to “manual” 768k. No wonder my machine was struggling.

Now how many folks would have known what to do? - few, I’ll tell you. Most would have just suffered through the problem. The number of people needing a “manual” page file is incredibly small. Why doesn’t Windows just “question” this setting occasionally.

Or, why not ask about it when you do disk maintenence? It’s likely to be the culpret long before fragmentation is.

They could easily pop up a window occasionally like “Your computer is set so that you must manually control the performance of virtual memory. Unless you have been specifically told to do this for a certain technical reason, you should set this back to “automatic.” Would you like to reset your virtual memory management to “automatic?” It’ll probably speed your computer up quite a bit.

If you’re machine is running slow, go ahead and check this.

In XP, Go to Control Panel -> system. Click on Advanced, then Performance

Click on settings…

Down on Virtual Memory, click on “change”

Make sure that “System Managed Size” is set, then OK your way out. Oh… and for some stupid reason, you must click on “SET” before you click on OK, or it ignores your settings. Go figure.

If you changed the settings, reboot. Enjoy your faster machine.

C’mon Microsoft, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

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