Now I know why it’s so hard to be a geek 
And why some people just prefer Macs. (Though I’m still sticking with Windows – for now…)
Q: When is a page file not a page file?
A: When it’s a commit charge.
Okay, that was not funny. And I didn’t think it was funny either. Funny though that it’s true. When you hit the time-honoured Ctrl-Alt-Del combination in Windows XP, you bring up the Task Manager, which shows real-time graphics of what are labelled Page File Usage (on the Performance tab). On further research, however, you will discover that, despite its name, the graphics are actually showing you the commit charge, which is duplicated and correctly labelled below.
To see actual paging file usage, you need to use Microsoft Management Console, a separate program, and create a paging file counter. This would be more fun if I didn’t have other work to do. The MMC display should be quite different from Task Manager’s readout.
The reason I’ve been doing all this is that I’ve been considering RAM and page file settings on three XP machines, and until today I was under the misconception that Task Manager does tell you about paging file usage.
I can’t come to a clear conclusion for the first machine, a laptop, because it’s not with me now; however, since its RAM has been upgraded, it should be okay.
For the second, my own laptop, I guess I’ll have to go back and keep watching the MMC counter, though I doubt I’ll need a large paging file as it’s got 2GB RAM. I recorded a commit charge peak of 900+MB the other day, so maybe I’ll try to recreate that with MMC running.
For the third, which is the PC I’m typing this on, I finally understand why MMC and Task Manager don’t seem to agree! This machine has given me the most grief because of it’s sluggish ‘performance’. I recorded commit charge peaks on a couple of days that exceeded the 512MB RAM amount, paired with poor responsiveness (no surprise). Today I decided to ‘borrow’ an extra gig of RAM from a nearby unused machine, and though I’m still running the original smaller paging file size, MMC reports a max 12% paging file usage – and the system is humming along fine so far.
Advice: try setting up MMC to monitor your actual PF usage, and set your paging file size accordingly.
