Virtual memory opinions

[chrisl2366]

I have 16gb of ram in my laptop. I also have a 120gb SSD. I read that a good rule of thumb is to put the paging file to 1.5 times the amount of physical ram. I actually have it set to 1gb. And I haven't had any problems. I don't want to completely disable it because of the memory dumps. I actually did have it disabled for quite some time a couple months ago without any trouble but my OS didn't bsod in that time either. But is that rule only if you are having trouble from running out of ram if say you only got 2-4gb? I don't do any editing so 16gb is actually overkill but ram got real cheap last year and I got a great deal on it. Any opinions? Thanks.

 

[_michaelm]

If you're running a 64 bit OS then I'd probably put something like 4GB in as pagefile - but realistically you don't need any since you'll never really use all that unless you run multiple VMs simultaneously. But having some will keep things on the safe side.

If you're running a 32 bit OS (which I hope you aren't) then you definitely want at least a few GB for your pagefile (virtual memory area) and you might as well sell 3/4 of your ram since you can't address it anyway!