Paging File

[pixi]

Hi everyone, I have a problem with my pc.  When its loading up it often gets stuck on the welcome page (when this happens the light on the tower stops flashing so i know the pc isnt doing anything)  It then takes up to half an hour to load up the pc.  Sometimes a message comes up about the paging file saying it hasnt got one or it is too small. If I click okay on this message, the pc loads up as normal.   I have been into the control panel and made sure the paging file has 2 and a half times the ram (which i believe is right) but it is still happening pretty often.   But then there are times when it doesnt happen for a month or so and the pc loads up as normal.  Please can someone offer a solution or advice?  Thanks from pixi about to have a nervous breakdown

[vehelpfulguy]

You could be getting these problems because the PC is running out of resources.

What is the spec of the PC. What processor, how much memory, what size hard disk (or disks). What operating system are you running.

Maybe your hard disk is full ?

Not sure how much you know about PCs, but the paging file is an area of hard disk that Windows uses when it runs out of real memory.

If real memory gets full then it swaps a part of real memory out to hard disk, when it needs it again it swaps it back in.

If your PC does not have enough real memory it can spend all its time swapping data from real memory to hard disk, and hence not get any other work done. 

There should be an option called "System Information" on one of the Windows menus to tell you what processor and how much real memory you have.

Right click, then Properties, on the disk icons in "My Computer" to find out the size of hard disks and how full they are. 

Put the information here and we will try and help. 

[pixi]

hi vehelpfulguy,

We have pentium4 processor-2.2ghz, 256mb ram and a 40 gb hard drive.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the hard disk memory (we only have 3.47 gb free space left) How come its always something thats staring you in the face? I will try to sort it out at weekend (theres loads of photos and a couple of massive programmes on the pc that we could take off) hopefully this will work.

Thank you very much for your help :)

[pixi]

sorry to be a pain, but i have just noticed that my system restore is taking up 4 gb of space, and also that I cant go any further back in restore before July 2005 (there were no system restore points in July but since the beginning of August there is a system checkpoint for every single day is this normal?) Thanks

[vehelpfulguy]

Never used system restore so cannot help you there.

But if this is a desktop PC it is very easy to add a second hard drive (not so easy on a laptop).

You can buy large hard drives, like 200Gb, for less than a �100 nowadays. You can put this in the PC case as a 'slave' and get 200Gb of disk space instantly.

If it is a laptop (or even if it isn't) you can get external hard drives that plug into the USB port. Again they can be huge, 100Gb or 200Gb, and you can use them to store photes, mp3s, movies etc

btw, if you have a CD writer I would start to back up some of the files on your hard disk. If it crashes then if you have no backup you have lost all that data.

[pixi]

hi vhg, sorry I took so long to answer ( I go to work about 1.00ish) Well I have started to cleanup my PC and so far have gained an extra 3GB or space. I chatted with mr pixi last night about a new hard drive and we decided that is the best thing to do. Thanks for your time and help :) (oh and ta for pointing out about backing stuff up, I do this every so often, but just to be on the safe side Im gonna back up everything I can over the next couple of days) Thank you :)