[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Arclight

Wasn't the "rule" 1.5x to 2x RAM? can't remember now, but that's what I've been using.

I've been googling "paging file Windows 7" and I'm seeing recommendations for a min of 1.5x, max 3x RAM.

I'd just plunk the page-file and game-installs on the fastest drive. In your case, I bet that's the 160GB one, especially if that happens to be a relatively new Western Digital.

It's a Seagate, about 1 year old. The 1 TB boot drive is the new Western Digital.

In mine I have a 10GB partition at the start of the disk (which is the fastest part, it get's slower in finding and writing data towards the outer portions of the platters) set to 6GB min and 8GB max (would be 9GB/12GB or 9216MB/12288MB in your case).

I can't tell you if it actually makes a difference; it's not like I did extensive benchmarking or something.

I felt like it made a difference when I was running XP, but then I wasn't getting the 6 gigs of RAM that I'm getting now. The main reason I went in and did it for the new Win7 setup was that I was getting a tremendous amount of lag trying to pull up data, which was really annoying considering that I was trying to install and restore stuff from files I backed up before the upgrade.

Then in the course of doing more searching regarding speeding up response times in general, I saw something in a thread here about the power management settings and a lightbulb went on over my head. I checked and sure enough it was set to power down the hard drives after 20 minutes of inactivity. So I'd find and run a setup file saved on the external drive, and by the time I finished getting the reinstalled program up and running to spec on the C drive and went back to look for something else on the backup drive, it would've powered down again. I changed the settings and it's been a LOT better since.

Some advice to never remove the page file from C: completely, to increase stability, but I've never had any issues with it. (though reading the next bit I'm gonna create a system-managed one on C: again)

So if I were to create a partition for a custom page file on the 2nd HDD with the settings noted above, should I just set a system managed one on the C: even though it's not in a separate partition? Or is there a way to shrink the existing single C: partition and create a separate one for another page file there? OTOH that seems like a lot of trouble for debatable increase in performance.

Oh and that bit at the bottom of the Virtual Memory settings, where it gives "total paging size file for all drives" - does that mean it's the Minimum and Recommended size allotted across all disks on the system? Is it recommending 9214 MB total split between all disks that have a page file on them if there's more than one? That always confuses me. Do those numbers really matter all that much (aside from the minimum allowed)?