Thursday, July 17, 2008

Vista Page File in Netherworld

I had an odd problem with a Windows Vista SP1 installation. I suddenly began getting "your computer is low on memory" warnings when nothing really had changed with the way I use the machine. I looked at Task Manager and saw that it was showing page file use of ~1700M / ~1800M. When I went to Advanced System Settings (System Properties) to examine the page file size (Advanced tab, Performance settings, then the Advanced tab again) it showed the total page file size as.... 0 MB!

I knew I had enabled a page file previously when I set up the machine, so I rebooted--and it still showed 0 MB for the page file size. So, I went to assign a new 4096 MB page file. When I did this, it gave me a message stating that pagefile.sys already existed (!) and asked if I wanted to overwrite it. I half expected the machine to die painfully when I approved this action, but it did not... and knock on particleboard, I haven't gotten any of the warnings since.

13 comments:

  1. Oh man thank you! I was having some major troubles with this error while trying to play Counter Strike Source. It just kept telling me to close hl2.exe (the game). And what's worse it would minimize the game literally every 5 minutes. Thanks for the fix!

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  2. I had the same problem, too. Page was set to none. Don't know if it matters, but my machine was built using a ZTI via PXE ... Vista Enterprise w/ SP1 integrated.

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  3. There's got to be some commonality to the issue. I've encountered this on two machines; the first was upgraded to SP1 later, and the second was installed with the Vista SP1 media directly.

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  4. Good grief, I have exactly the same issue - my paging file says it was zero too! Thanks so much for this post - I was juat about to format, I would never have found this out without your help. Thanks! Chris

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  5. Could an app. such as trueCrypt be turning off auto-management of pagefiles? Just a thought. I have no idea if that's true.

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  6. That's an interesting suggestion. I installed TrueCrypt to the affected computer, so that might make a lot of sense!

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  7. That's the last thing I remember installing prior to seeing these messages ... TrueCrypt. I'm not certain of this and I won't reinstall trueCrypt just to test it, but I think I remember ticking something about virtual memory caching; also, I'm guessing it's generically in the best interest of encryption to turn off virtual memory so the system doesn't control what gets cached to the hard drive.

    I'm just now setting my system root drives/program files to "system managed" sizes and all other drives (including mounted trueCrypt files) to "none." Hopefully Vista will not try to virtualize any new mounts. Don't really know its behavior with respect to new drive mounts. [Anyone know the answer to this? Anyone? Bueller?]

    I'm also hoping that by setting all trueCrypt mounts as "removable media" that everyone will play nicely and write to disk prior to unmounting the device.

    Finally, it's a bit scary to me that Vista asks to replace my pagefile.sys. When will it do this and what happens to the contents of the existing file? Think I'll post this before hitting "OK" to replacing it. :-)

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  8. Oh ya. This person suggests turning off off-line files, if that fits your work requirements, as well.

    http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/195324-Vista-is-trying-to-kill-my-poor-laptop/?CommentID=195475

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  9. Yes its gotta be truecrypt, i was going through my head saying this is all i have installed recently but surely cant be that. However since you guys have done the same thing im am 100% sure now, i even remember unchecking the box that said turn off auto managment pagfiles, even though i had no idea what it meant i unchecked it but then truecrypt encouraged me to check it again otherwise something would go wrong so i did.

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  10. I just stumbled across this post whilst looking for a solution for the same problem (on Vista x64). I notice that:
    1) My page file was disabled too
    2) I'm also a TrueCrypt user

    I think we can safely assume that TrueCrypt is the culprit. Probably it turns the page file off for security reasons.

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  11. Thank you for your help. I am also a TrueCrypt user. I changed the setting to allow the system to manage the page file. I hope this works!

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  12. I didn't install truecrypt, but I was getting this message regularly. Turns out my page file size was 256K, which is too small by definition for Vista, which wants at least 512K (actually 400K) to run its error reporting. So I expanded to the recommended amount and seems to have fixed the problem. Point is: truecrypt isn't the only reason this happens

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  13. Dude, you absolutley rock!!!! Saved my gaming career, as it kept shutting down my games mid-combat.
    THANK YOU

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