Windows Vista has a new paging file system that can take up more disk space than previous versions of Windows. Here’s how to determine how much space your Vista installation will use and what you can do to reduce its size. The paging file system is a new feature in Windows Vista that allows the operating system to store temporary files and data in memory instead of on disk. This can save disk space, but it can also increase the size of the Windows Vista installation. To determine how much space your Vista installation will use, first check the size of the paging file using the Disk Management tool in Control Panel. If your computer has at least 4GB of RAM, Vista will use about 1GB of disk space for its paging file. If your computer has less than 4GB of RAM, Vista will use more disk space—up to 2GB—for its paging file. If you want to reduce the size of your Windows Vista installation, you can delete any unnecessary files from its paging file or disable the paging file system entirely by setting the “UsePagedPoolForAllFiles” option in Registry Editor to “0”. ..
In Windows XP, when you added more memory to your computer, you had to manually go and increase the size of your paging file to correctly match the amount of memory in your computer. Windows Vista does away with this by automatically setting the optimal size for the paging file, even after you add more memory to your computer.
For instance, if you had a computer with 1GB of memory, your paging file would be roughly 1300mb, but if you add another 1GB of memory to your computer to make a total of 2GB, now when you look at the paging file, it will have automatically increased:
You can turn this setting on and off by right-clicking the Computer icon, clicking the Advanced System Settings link, then clicking the Settings button under Performance:
Click the Advanced tab, and you should see the current size of the paging file as in the first screenshot. Click the Change button, and you’ll finally see the checkbox to “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives”
You can uncheck this box and set the paging file manually if you’d like. If you have a number of fast drives in your system, you could configure the system for optimal performance by using a faster drive for the paging file, but I’d recommend just leaving the default setting on in most cases.
