What a triumph of stereotypes. 1) Windows (a clean one, like IoT, Server, LTSC or a manually cleaned Pro) uses the same ram that used Vista 15 years ago. (600MB for 32bit, 1GB for 64bit) And 4GB are more than enough to do any normal activity, using a bit of brain (remove defender, don't use chrome, don't fill it with unneeded sw and so on). Actually in 4GB you can even run a virtual machine of a recent OS, or even 4/5 XP running at the same time. 2) Linux means nothing. It's isn't a single product, and albeit there are light and effective distro that nobody knows like the great Q4OS (in the tde edition), a distro meant for the average Joe Using Plaasma6 or Gnome 4x uses possibly more ram than a clean windows. Perhaps, the most demanding RAM SW nowadays are the browsers, and if you use say, vivaldi on linux it uses that same RAM it uses in windows (and in macos) There is no free lunch, the only way to spare ram is to use your brain, and that's OS independent.
TigTex has mentioned the Laptop memory RAM is soldered and in fact what I am seeing that they are talking about Virtual Memory problem, not Virtual machine... Therefore poor planning having "Soldered RAM" is crazy... SO, they are sh*t out of luck.... ATGPUD2003
Yes I can read, what about you? Did you read what I wrote? Yes it is, the culprit is, as usual apple that show to other brands new ways to screw the users.
Acer-5100, I would never use Soldered Ram and IT's Sucks.. Apple that biggest stupid idea and can't upgrade any those BS! Apple nice, But pain the butt to fix it.. Be honestly.. I been doing 40 yrs working computer, Hardware and software... So... Everyday I see it, "Oh Sh*T!" here is problems "Soldered Ram, or SSD " Funny part I have MSI laptop was awesome, but I had upgraded i3 core to i5 which nice but has odd Ziff cpu socket M that need flat screw driver to unlatch it and swap cpu and works. One slight problem my bios are restricted max out 8GB, I did tried 16GB DD3 and it spit out and move back to 8GB which I can live.. Although, I have 3 desktops, One is i7 with 32gb ram, 2nd was Xenon (4 cores+4 threads) 32GB Non ECC, and My tech has faster Xenon CPU 8 Cores 32gb non ecc. Rest of my 4 Servers are Xenon 2011 has up to 32 cores with all ECC ram 64GB.. ATGPUD2003
My general rule for pagefile size is if my maximum ram usage never exceeds my installed ram the pagefile goes out of the window. In OPs case with 4gb soldered ram (as one of my laptops -the one that I hate the most btw-) you will need at least 4gb of pagefile.sys for any normal use. On my main laptop with 64GB ram the pagefiles goes out of the window before even the installation finishes.
It depends on what you consider "normal use" Atm I'm using my PC (I mean the 2007 notebook equipped with 4GB of RAM) "normally" I have a VM running, I'm browsing the WEB and WMC is playing the TV on the secondary monitor. The pagefile is still stuck at it's minimum of 64MB, exactly how is supposed to be. The pagefile is a reserve, the system must use it as the last resort, and there isn't any reason to use a fixed 4GB one, there wasn't on HDDs there isn't even less on SSD.
You and me are not normal use scenario The 4GB goes for the person who asked the question and in the absence of more detailed use information.
Im not really a power user of computers. I mean that I dont use multiple programs running at once.. also I try to get care of ram usage looking at ram monitors and discovering the most efficient program to do same task. The real memory computer drainer is WEB browsing. Any browser recomendation or memory settings to avoid use soo much memory while browsing? I try to use old firefox versions(previous chromium code), disabling browser cache and lowering the browser session history. With a web browser that would clean memory usage after visit a page... my 4Gb machine would be more than enough to run without pagefile
There is really not a lot you can do for that. If a page contains huge images or complex code, that code needs to be executed, those images needs to be loaded. (assuming you want to enjoy the website fully). Sure there are browsers that use the memory more sparingly like PaleMoon/NewMoon. An option can be to use Opera 58 (launch it with the -no-update switch) that still has the Turbo option accessible (the server side thing is still there because the smartphones), you'll get compressed data and lowered quality images sparing both bandwidth and consumer RAM. Keep in mind that Opera58 now is fairly old, and also that Opera (the company) is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate, so use it for random browsing, but use a decent browser like Vivaldi for privacy sensitive things and commercial operations.
Contrary to some of the histrionic posts here, if you have enough RAM you certainly can disable 'Virtual Memory' (your page file) in Windows, and if you have enough RAM, and depending on the application(s) you run, things will be fine. The worst case an application will throw an 'Out Of Memory' message, and crash, or Windows will Blue Screen on you. There are a lot of use cases and workloads where disabling 'Virtual Memory' is smart -- advantages depending on what you're doing may include more security, lower latencies (as you're forcing the system to use RAM), and lower SSD wear to name a few. There's lots of information on interwebs benchmarking use cases from Gaming, HPC, DAW applications where you can see both measurable and noticeable performance improvements -- or even DIY, it's not hard. Some applications and games will require a page file, even though they'll never use or see a use case where even 30% of system RAM is used, and will be unstable or even crash, so caveat emptor. If you're not using your PC for anything critical, there's no harm in seeing what works best for you, and Windows wouldn't have the option if it wasn't useful...
Historic post are there because historic application exist, and sometimes historic cruft is still inside of some modern applications (including some system functions, as discussed earlier). So disabling the virtual memory altogether is something that maybe smart on Linux but not on windows. Setting a minimal starting value is as good as not having any pagefile but prevents any unforeseen problem.
Windows always makes some internal use of the pagefile, like recording blue screen information and reducing memory fragmentation. It is therefore not recommended to fully disable it.
The bywords here are 'some', and 'always' -- obviously if you disable writing to the event log the page file will never be used for this, even if 'Virtual Memory' is enabled, period... And having the event log enabled if your system is not a crash-fest, and everything is working properly -- is of dubious value as well... Similarly with the copious amounts of RAM most consumer PCs have, consumer use-cases and work loads: a system equipped with 32GB of RAM (or more) playing games or running consumer applications will virtually never see a use case where memory fragmentation is an issue, or even a hinderance to performance, where unneeded swapping, frequently and measurably hinders performance (and security). It would take an enormous amount of uptime on even a 16GB system running something like a really crappy version of non-linear video editing application to get to a place where memory fragmentation was a rational concern... So sure, if you have a memory constrained system, are running critical, very memory intensive applications, that are using most of your system RAM and have long uptime requirements where your system will be running these applications for weeks or months, 'Virtual Memory' may be beneficial. But for many consumers, there are more use cases where disabling 'Virtual memory' will be more beneficial than leaving it on, as long as they're aware there are applications that may not like it and remember they disabled it if they see an 'Out Of Memory' error message or instability. It's also 'not recommended' you ever change any Windows default settings, consult anyone but Microsoft about configuring Windows, object to sharing 'ALL' your personal data with Microsoft, always color inside the lines, never put Q-tips into your ears, and ever disobey any government authority regarding anything...
Pagefile means you leave space to your RAM to put more hot data and put the useless ones out into disk. It's not meant to be an expansion to ram in case you are out of it. Moreover part of the difference between win and linux is that linux lies about the memory it commits while nt kernel does not. This means that whenever a program calls sth like malloc to commit some data it MIGHT use but is not currently using,(sth which programs do all the time), the inexistence of pagefile would mean you actually put empty gaps in your RAM that noone would use. Total waste of good RAM. Also if you see in explorer a pagefile of having a size of eg 8GB does not mean it has actually written 8GBs of data to your SSD, but just that it has committed disk space.