There’s never enough physical memory available in Windows, which is why it utilises a special file on your hard drive called the paging file to provide additional memory when your RAM is fully utilised. As the hard drive is one of the performance bottlenecks in your PC, what exactly can you do to tweak these settings to give your PC a speed boost? The answer is plenty.

First up, remember that virtual memory is no substitute for real RAM – if you’re running XP on 512MB or Vista/7 on 1GB, double it via an upgrade to reduce the load on virtual memory. Vista/Win7 users can also plug in a spare USB flash drive and enable ReadyBoost to give your PC a small speed boost too – this option will either appear under AutoPlay options when you plug the drive in, or you can click Start > Computer, right-click the drive and select Properties > ReadyBoost tab to set it up.

Tweak Virtual Memory Settings

Click Start, right-click Computer or My Computer and select Properties. Switch to the Advanced tab (XP) or click Advanced System Settings (Vista and Win7). Click Settings under Advanced, select the Advanced tab and click Change under Virtual memory.

Two things to avoid: first, don’t be tempted to set no paging file, even if you have plenty of RAM installed. Also, avoid trying to set a static page file size – since Windows XP came out, Windows really is best at managing the paging file.

If you have a second internal hard drive (not another partition on the same physical drive) or an external eSATA drive, you can spread the paging file across this drive to relieve the load on your system drive, helping boost performance. To do this, untick Automatically manage paging file size for all drives. Scroll through your list of drives and select the least-used partition on your second drive. Choose System managed size and click Set. Click OK three times and reboot when prompted.

Defrag The Paging File

Because the paging file is in use by Windows, it’s ignored by the Disk Defragmenter tool built into Windows. The best way to keep the paging file defragged is to use a free program called Puran Defrag, which defrags system files at boot time, before they’re locked by Windows.