Increase computer speed through virtual memory

Memory on your hard drive is much less costly then RAM, so optimizing your virtual memory settings is a good choice to make your PC run as fast as possible. These days hard drives are filling up faster then ever, and all the time programs are leaving massive chunks of files behind, that even tried and true cleaning programs like ccleaner can not get rid of.

For virtual memory to make your PC as fast as possible you must have the extra space on your harddrive to allocate away from the storage of files and for the use of extra RAM. This is where a visual hard drive program called Tree Pie, Visdir or Disk Explorer saves the day. These programs show a graphical view of your hard drive allowing you to to see exactly what folders are taking up the most space and organize your machine better. in the Windows 95/98 era, conventional wisdom held that you should manually set your virtual memory, (ie., pagefile) size to at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM to optimize performance.

This still holds true but particularly for older machines, with less RAM, a very new and high end machine with a lot of RAM may see little to no performace increase while an older machine may see large benefits. for example on an old machine i tested this on i got around a 10 percent jump after upping the original pagefile size to two times the amount of RAM. Allocating any more virtual memory then this will make no difference to the speed of your computer and may have adverse effects.

To make sure you have enough space to set for virtual memory, lets get into a visual hard drive application, download either Tree Pie or Visual Directory Explorer. Check to see where you may have duplicate files, or junk files taking up unnecessary space. Many applications after they are deleted leave behind large files, using these programs as well as ccleaner, can greatly increase performance and extra space. Ccleaner can be used to quickly uninstall programs then delete the leftover registry entries for these programs, ccleaner can also delete, shady Active X registry entries and other registry entries that point to dead ends. Ccleaner will also do the standard clearing out your temp folders, cookies and recycling bin. Here is an episode of Hack5 that covers Tree Pie.

Right click on my computer and go to properties –> advanced –> settings
Then you will be in performance options, click change and roughly double your ammount of Virtual memory then you must click set, then OK out of all th windows. To do this in Vista click “Advanced system settings” in the System Control Panel and do the above instructions.”