▷ What is pagefile.sys and what is it for

The Windows operating system has always been characterized by the huge number of files it has spread out, and one of them is pagefile.sys which is of considerable size. An installation of Windows 10 can perfectly occupy 10 GB without installing absolutely nothing on the system. But this amount will quickly increase when we start installing things and creating temporary files, etc.

Index of contents

The system always stores files temporarily to be able to access them in a better way and thus obtain better system performance in case of not having enough RAM memory. In so many tangles of dll, sys, etc files, it is quite complicated to be able to identify which files are good and which are bad, and also where they are located.

One of these and more significant files is the pagefile.sys file. We will see this today in our article and we will see what influence it has on the operation of our system.

What is pagefile.sys Windows 10

The pagefile.sys file is a variable size file that is part of the Windows 10 system from the moment of its installation. This means that it is not a virus nor is it installed by any other external program. Pagefile.sys is used by the system to temporarily store part of the data that is stored in the physical RAM of our equipment.

This means that this file is a kind of backup copy of the files contained in RAM memory. Its location will probably already be known by almost all of us. Since precisely for the curious this article is made. Pagefile.sys is located at the root of the C: drive and they have the status of a cult, that is, we can only see it if we use, for example, the WinRAR file browser or another similar one. At least in our case and with the latest version of Windows 10 it has been like this.

Another way in which it probably sounds more than the usefulness of this file is because it is in charge of making the virtual memory of the system effective.

Windows 10 pagefile.sys file does not appear

Don't worry if you just verified the existence of this file and you haven't found it. This file, on computers with enough RAM memory, may be disabled by default. This is so because having a considerable size of RAM memory the system will not have the need to dump its content in a support file. It can also be due to the fact that this file is not shown in the file explorer even if the option to see hidden files is activated. The benefits of not having pagefile.sys are as follows:

• It will improve the performance of the system by not needing to extract information from the hard disk to take it to memory The applications that could be saved in this file will now be run directly in RAM memory We free up a lot of space on our hard disk We make our drive suffer less, especially if it is SSD as regards to read and write operations

So, if Windows 10 has decided to deactivate this paging file or pagefile.sys, it is because we have enough physical memory resources to use the hard disk to do this job.

If in the opposite case we find that this file exists on our computer, it is because the system has deemed it necessary to use it, and in principle, it is not recommended that we delete it, because surely one day it will be necessary. Still, let's proceed to it.

Delete pagefile.sys file Windows 10

Now we are going to explain the procedure to delete or disable the pagefile.sys file. for it we will follow the feels procedure.

• The first thing we will have to do is press the key combination " Windows + R " to open the Run tool. Now we will have to write the following command in the text box

sysdm.cpl

• Press Enter to execute the command. The result will be the opening of a system properties window. In this window we will have to go to the " Advanced options tab "

• We must click on the " Settings " button to access the advanced options. In the new window that appears we are located on " advanced options " In this window we can activate or deactivate pagefile.sys

Now we are going to disable the first option of “ Automatically manage paging file size for all drives ”. In this way we can adjust the relevant parameters.

To deactivate pagefile.sys what we will have to do is activate the option " No paging file"

The next thing to do is click the " OK " button so that Windows notifies us that it will be necessary to restart the computer to apply the changes. In which case we accept and continue the process.

We will already have the pagefile.sys Windows 10 file removed from our hard drive. Now the person in charge of managing the files will only be the RAM memory

Resize virtual memory or pagefile.sys

In addition to enabling or removing the pagefile.sys file, we can also customize the size of the virtual memory of our operating system.

• Here the first thing we will do is deactivate the option "Automatically manage the size" And then we will activate the option "Custom size"

Here we must take into account a series of rules. As a general rule, virtual memory should be allocated between 1.5 and 2 times the RAM we have. For example, if we have 2 GB, the ideal would be to assign double: 2 × 2 = 4 GB. We will not have to follow it to the letter either, obviously if we have 4 GB we are not going to put 8 GB of virtual memory, but it would be good to at least put the same thing, that is to say 4 GB.

From 8 GB of RAM these rules are meaningless, since we have enough RAM, so leaving 4GB of virtual memory is enough.

As for the maximum size, the ideal is to allocate twice that of virtual memory, that is, if we allocate 4 GB, then we place 8GB here. As before we will not follow it to the letter.

In addition, we can also place this file where we want, if we have more than one hard disk.

Conclusion and use

These are the options we have to modify or disable the pagefile.sys file. We will also know what it is used for and the influence it has on our team.

We recommend keeping the option that the system automatically manages the space you need in the paging file. Surely nothing happens to disable it, but there may be occasional errors like blue screenshots, which are never welcome.

Otherwise this is all about the pagefile.sys file.

The following information may also be helpful:

What have you decided to do with pagefile.sys? If you need to know more or anything, write to us in the comments.