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Recently I successfully recovered an old machine of mine. I noticed that it has only 2 GB of RAM so I decided to search for a way to "use the hard drive as RAM."

After those researches, I noticed that a way to do that is by changing the paging file size. What I did is taking 7 GB from C: drive and 1 GB from D: drive and turned them into an F: 8 GB partition named memory with a purpose of being fully taken by the RAM. My questions are:

1- Is it alright if I disable the paging file for C: drive?

2- If, for example, set paging file to be available only on F: drive, will programs running from C: and D: drives be able to use it?

3- What is the purpose of "initial size"? If I want the whole drive to be used should, I set both initial and maximum sizes to 8 GB or should maximum size be 8 GB and initial size be 0 MB? I don't get what initial size is meant for.

Edit: The running system is Windows 10 32-bit, and all of those partitions are on the same physical drive.

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  • The benefits of different methods are highly dependant on what OS you're using & whether it's 32 or 64-bit. Please edit that info into your question. Also, let us know whether these partitions are all on the same physical drive, & whether it's, presumably, an HD rather than SSD.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 10:45
  • Yes, these partitions are on the same physical drive. And this machine's system is a 32-bit Windows 10.
    – yuhyuhaye
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 10:47
  • I can't provide this as an answer because I don't have hard data to back me up, but on a 32-bit Win10 you might see a very very slight [probably not even noticeable] gain by setting min & max both to 8GB on F: Usually on Win10 letting the system manage it is good enough, but Win10 is really designed for SSDs & significantly more RAM these days. The 32-bit option is in itself a bad limitation, meaning you really only ever have 4GB to play with.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 10:52
  • I agree with my comrades here: those specs are barely enough to run Windows 10 as is, let alone with several RAM-hungry applications running alongside it, but if that's all you've got, then that's all you've got. Contrarily to macOS (and OS X before it), Windows needs some guidelines to set the size of your pagefile(s) (because yes, there can be more than one), and letting it handle it is usually the best course of action. This said, a fixed size means less fragmentation, and emptying it on shutdown guarantees it'll stay clean over time, more or less. Doing without is also possible with 2GB.
    – user1019780
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 10:57
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    The only way to increase RAM is to increase RAM. The page file is in no way an extension of RAM or otherwise similar to RAM. Only RAM is directly accessible by the CPU. The page file is not.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 11:06

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2- If, for example, set paging file to be available only on F: drive, will programs running from C: and D: drives be able to use it?

Yes, because the operating system is managing this space and the location of your programs does not matter. A program never gets direct access to those spaces. The operating system decides which memory to swap out or swap in.

3- What is the purpose of "initial size"? If I want the whole drive to be used should, I set both initial and maximum sizes to 8 GB or should maximum size be 8 GB and initial size be 0 MB? I don't get what initial size is meant for.

Initial size prevents defragmentation on HDDs when the page file increases in size. On SSDs it does not matter.

After those researches, I noticed that a way to do that is by changing the paging file size. What I did is taking 7 GB from C: drive and 1 GB from D: drive and turned them into an F: 8 GB partition named memory with a purpose of being fully taken by the RAM. My questions are:

I can't follow what you really did and can't comment on it.

1- Is it alright if I disable the paging file for C: drive?

It depends - try to be more specific.

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