Very high pf usage on task manager?

Question

My pf usage on task manager is insanely high its usually around 1gb i think... but its 3.42gb at the moment and has been very high all week and it is causing programs to crash and shut down. how can i reduce this???

Thanks,

Harry.

Answer 1

You don't want to reduce it. Let Windows manage it. It means you have all sorts of things running or going on. The way to fix this is to get more ram. With a 32-bit windows you can only utilize about 3.5gb-ish of ram. If you want to use 4 or more, you'll have to have a 64-bit version. The more ram you have, the less pagefile you'll be using.

If you don't know what pagefile is, it's sort of psuedo-ram. If you don't have enough ram to do everything the computer is trying to do, it will write out some of that information to the hard drive. When it needs that info, it will write out another piece of ram info to the hard drive and grab the piece it needs from the pagefile and load that back to ram. This can also be called swap space or a swap file. If you have sufficient ram, everything can sit in ram and the hard drive does not need to be utilized for swapping.

To see an immediate reduction, try not running so many things at once. Some programs are ram-hogs, like photoshop, web-browsers with several tabs open, etc.