Win XP system virtual memory standard setting method

When your game is playing right, or when you open multiple windows in Passion Surf, your system will always prompt as shown on the right. The machine was slow like a snail at this time, and the good mood just disappeared. In our article, the 20th E5 version of the rookie file, "Retrieve the occupied system disk space", mentioned the simple setting of virtual memory. This problem has attracted the interest of many novice friends, which they often encounter. Case. What is the role of virtual memory? How much is it better? This article will give a detailed introduction to it. All of the following steps use the Windows XP operating system as an example.

"Standard Room" for Virtual Memory

When the system is running, first transfer the required commands and data from external storage (such as hard disk, floppy disk, CD, etc.) into memory. The CPU then reads the instruction or data from the memory to perform the operation, and stores the operation result in the memory. The memory plays a role like a "secondary passer". When running a program that requires a lot of data and takes up a lot of memory, the memory warehouse will be "stuffed", and in this "warehouse" there is always a part of the temporarily unused data occupying a limited space, so this part is to be " "Inert" data "please" out to free up space for "active" data usage. At this point, you need to create another backup "warehouse" to store "lazy" data. Due to the large space of the hard disk, the Microsoft Windows operating system selects the address of the backup "warehouse" on the hard disk. This backup "warehouse" is virtual memory. By default, virtual memory is saved in the system partition of the hard disk as a swap file called Pagefile.sys.

Manually setting virtual memory

In the default state, the system manages virtual memory, but the default management mode of the system is usually conservative, which will cause the page file to be discontinuous during automatic adjustment. , while reducing the efficiency of reading and writing, the work efficiency is not high, so there will often be a "sufficient memory" prompt, let us set it up.

1 Right-click the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and select the "Properties" option in the right-click menu that appears to open the "System Properties" window. Click the "Advanced" tab in the window, the dialog box for advanced settings appears (Figure 1);



Figure 1

2 Click on the "Properties" area of ​​the "Settings" " button, select the "Advanced" tab in the "Performance Options" window that appears, open its dialog box.

3 In the dialog box, you can see the area about virtual memory. Click the "Change" button to enter the setting window of "Virtual Memory". Select a partition with a larger free capacity, check the box in front of "Custom Size", fill in the specific values ​​in the "Initial Size" and "Maximum" columns, and then click the "Settings → OK" button. Yes (Figure 2), finally restart the computer to make the virtual memory settings take effect.

Figure 2

The above is the setting method of virtual memory in Windows XP operating system. The author also briefly mentions the Windows 98 operating system. Settings:

In Windows 98, go to Start → Settings → Control Panel → System → Performance → Virtual Memory. In the pop-up dialog box, select the User-specified virtual memory setting option, which will be virtual. The location of the memory is set in the appropriate partition, and the minimum and maximum values ​​of the virtual memory are set. Finally, click the "OK" button to complete (Figure 3).


Figure 3

Suggestion: You can divide a small partition specifically for virtual memory, IE temporary file storage, etc., you can periodically defragment the partition, so that Better improve the efficiency of your computer.
tailored like virtual memory

1. ordinary method provided

according to the general method for setting the minimum virtual memory swap file The maximum value can be set to 1.5 times the memory capacity at the same time, but if the memory itself has a large capacity, such as 512MB of memory, then the space it occupies is also considerable. So we can set the basic value of virtual memory in this way: the memory capacity is less than 256MB, it is set to 1.5 times; above 512MB, set to half of the memory capacity; between 256MB and 512MB is set to the same value as the memory capacity .

2. Accurate setting method

Since the actual application of each person is not the same, for example, some people want to run large programs such as 3DMAX, Photoshop, etc., and some people may just type Play some small games, so the requirements for virtual memory are not the same, so we have to accurately set the value of virtual memory space according to local conditions.

1 first set the virtual memory custom "initial size", "maximum value" to two identical values, such as 500MB;

2 and then open the "Control Panel → Administrative Tools →Performance. In the “Performance” dialog box that appears, expand “Performance Logs and Alarms” in the left column, select the “Counter Log” under it, right click in the blank space in the right column, and select the right click menu. "New Log Settings" option;

3 Fill in any name in the "Name" column of the pop-up dialog box, such as "Virtual Memory Test". Click the "Add Counter" button in the window to go to the next window;

4Open the "Performance Object" drop-down list in this window, select "Paging File", and select "Select from the list" "Counter", and select "%Usage Peak" in the lower column; check "Select sample from list", select "_Total" in the lower column, and then click "Add → Close" to end (Figure 4).


Figure 4

5 In order to view the log file conveniently, you can open the "Log File" tab, select "Log File Type" as "Text File", and finally click " OK button to return to the "performance" main interface;

6 in the right column can be found a "virtual memory test" project, if the project is red, it has not started, click For items, select the "Start" option in the context menu (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Next, run some of your favorite applications. After running for a while, enter the default directory under the system partition where the log file is located. PerfLogs ", find the "virtual memory test _000001.csv" and open it with the Notepad program (Figure 6), in this content, we look at the penultimate value in each column, this value is the virtual memory usage ratio, found The maximum value of this value, such as "46" in the figure, is multiplied by 46% (500 megabytes of virtual memory value) to get a value of 230MB.


Figure 6

With this value, the initial size can be set to 230MB, and the maximum value can be freely set according to the disk space. It is generally recommended to set it to the minimum value of 2 Up to 3 times. In this way, we can make the virtual memory more precise and make our love machine run more smoothly and more efficiently.