Pagefile views and request for advice

yeah, English (United States). But im not sure if changing Language is enough.
There are 2 locales.. System (installation media) and User (with can be changed).
I have en_US install media and en_US setting for user.
You have to check things out by yourself and post results.

 

1. Win XP install CD must be en_US
2. Regional and Language Options > Advanced > Language for non-Unicode programs > must be English (United States)

So both of these must be true?

 

I dont know. Just try running programs and see if they works or bark at you

I run all my OS (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD) as en_US from long time.
Localization is just a annoying burden.

 

Not the audio workstation, It's the video/audio workstation that has no pagefile, That computer runs Photoshop, Premiere, Quicktime Pro, ffmpeg, inkscape, etc.
All works quite well. 4 GB Ram installed, XP reports 3.5 GB Ram

Flier XP, Did you try out the computer without page file?

 

TMTGTR: They sure will do. The question is, do you notice that OS is snappier
and less I/O in the background.

 

I have 8GB of ram on my Win XP 64 and I never had to play with the paging to get more performance in games. I remember reading somewhere that even having SSD doesn't make that much difference in FPS Besides having fast loadtimes at the start of a level. I think that disabling paging on XP 32 bit might not be such a good idea for games since games use more ram for gameplay than regular software anyway you might find yourself running out of ram and crashing. The ram might also be used for graphics processing as well and fill faster. But that's just my theory.

 

Disabling PF is not about raw performance in FPS games. Its about general more snappier UX on OS and less background I/O. Yes, it depends on workload.

These days most people use SSD disks and they are much faster in seek time
and faster on I/O so paging is much less noticeable. Im still on spinning rust, so I
prefer to keep it loads to minimum. Thats why I prefer to keep/cache everything
into RAM. Difference between cold cache and hot cache is very significant.

 

@Borg
I see, OK thanks again.

 

I know what you meant. But the OP is using XP 32 bit to play a game. He wants less choking in his game and he has only 3GB of ram. Which can fill out faster disabling paging. Ram usage will be higher and many videocards also use system ram to process graphics. In your case you have 16GB of ram. You don't have that problem.

And either way in the case of the game I don't think that playing with the paging settings is going to increase FPS in the game which is what the OP wants. I game on my XP 64. Games like Batman Arkham City. They run fullspeed without playing with the paging. What the OP needs is check if the video card or cpu are over heating. If they're cool then maybe replace the video card with a better one for better performance. I have the ATI HD4850 and I can tell you it's still a powerful card.

 

Checked the Audio workstation no page file and never gives me a problem with only 3 GB RAM. I work mostly in 24 bit audio 48 or 96 kHz sample rates 32 bit plugins (Most using internal 64 bit calculation).
Multi-tracks with real time processing have not been pushed to the limit. I'm tempted to try but I'll wait til a crash finds me.
This is a P4 machine too.

 

More info:
https://www.howtogeek.com/199990/should-i-disable-the-page-file-if-my-computer-has-a-lot-of-ram/

I know I keep repeating myself but the OP wants to play Flight Simulator and the performance of the game is not what he would like. Playing with the pagefile settings isn't going to fix the framerate of the game. Checking for overheating or upgrading the videocard will.

Back in 2013 I had an old Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Socket 478 with 2GB of ram. and XP 32 bit. Back then I upgraded the videocard to an ATI HD4670 1GB AGP. And I can tell you I could play some games that listed dualcore as a requirement and I could play them at very playable speeds just by upgrading the videocard.

 

Sigh... I love reading such comments like those from howtogeek. People basicaly
do NOT have clue what PF is and what it was designed for.

PF is here to use when you have not enough RAM to run some apps.
So, enabling PF you can paged out some rary used pages to disk to free up RAM so more can be allocated by APPs. But, if that page is somehow needed, it needs to be paged in back into RAM. If there is NOT enough RAM, first some page needs to be paged out to disk to free up RAM again. This can escalate to excessive I/O and make system much slower. Of course its a corner case. And its better to have slower system that system crash due to not enough memory.

But again, if you have plenty of RAM and you know that most of the time you are way beyond 25% of memory usage, you can go and disable PF completly. This forces OS to keep everything in RAM. No unnecessary I/O for paging in/paging out.

So, if you like to have bigger buffer, and some background I/O activity is not an issue for you, then use PF. System was designed for it. But, if you prefer to have nore snappier OS, you want your minimized tasks to go back instantly instead of swapping in their pages first, turn off PF.

The point is, you first need to have good tool to monitor your system.
Windows XP have perfmon tool, with while it shows you what you needs
is very ugly tool to use. Thats why I wrote my own stuff (both console and GUI)
to keep an eye on importand metrics.

As for Microsoft wisdom and general comments, they know what they are doing,
do NOT touch that, well, they are NOT that smart.
2000/XP/2003 have several limitations to MM and CM that Linux handles better.
For example, not much tunables for CM (limits mostly).
No tunables when to start swapping as well. Linux have all those.

System Cache is per user session due to security descriptors, so if user A reads
file, it goes to cache. When user B reads it too, it not read from cache because its
private. It needs to go for disk and then user B cache. Waste. This is terrible
for multiuser Windows systems for example.

I can bring more, but its very technical and boring to most people anyway.

 

The original poster is looking to play games on the computer. Most videocards use system ram for better performance. AMD Hypermemory or Nvdias turbocache. I don't know what video card this person has. But if you're running a 32 bit OS with 3GB you need more ram available to load the new stuff. Old stuff that already loaded can stay in the HDD.

The only tip I heard over the years is that you can set the paging to another drive and a fixed size if you want a little boost. But still even that pales in comparison to check if the PC is overheating and using the best CPU and videocard your motherboard can support to get rid of the stuttering the original poster is talking about. The thing is this person never posted the specs of the computer so we can recommend upgrades.

Here's a sample videos:

 

Ahhh, makes me miss Win9x/ME with the system.ini MaxCacheSize setting

shareware Outer Technologies CachemanXP and
freeware SysInternals CacheSet set custom limits in XP

Plus your browser (at least Mozilla-based ones) save a site session file everytime you open or close a tab, so it'll recover all your tabs after the crash.

 

Hello there; thanks for the tip, would I be asking too much for you to provide is with a link for the version that will still work on XP. I'm having trouble locating one as I've been searching.

Thank you in advance.

~Sal

 

Cacheset

 

Thank you very much and your file upload works just fine. Thank you for your contribution to the forum and the community support.