Web Talk

As you know, a nice solution to the lack of RAM affecting many computers nowadays, is to use portions of your hard disk (or even a specific partition) as virtual memory.  A virtual memory is nothing else than a paging file stored on  the hard disk which is used by your operating system as RAM. But what happen when you have more than an operating system on your computer (multi-boot)? Simple, they will create specific paging files for their individually needs, regardless the fact that it would be sufficient to have a single shared pagefile.sys to solve all issues.  Let’s learn how to make your operating systems share the same virtual memory and save space on your hard disk thanks to a simple trick.

The first thing to do is to pick the  drive or the partition where to place the paging file. After that, just follow these simple steps which will have to be repeated for each operating system installed on your computer:

1. Click Start.
2. Right-click on Computer and select Propierties.
3. Click Advanced System Setings. (on Windows XP just click the Advanced tab)
4. Under the Performance section, click the Settings button.
5. Now select the Advanced tab.
6. Under the Virtual Memory section click Change.
7. Untick Automatically manage paging file size for all partitions.
8. For each partition where you don’t want to place the paging file check the option No paging file.
9. In the partition containing the shared paging file (pagefile.sys) select Custom Size or System managed size and enter the values determing the size of the file itself.

This tricks works for Windows XP, Vista and the new Windows 7