Can someone please explain to me what that does? Is it even necessary to have, if I have 32bit XP with 4 gigs of ram (of course it only sees ~3gig)?

Is it even remotely possible that the pagefile can cause bluescreen? My machine has 3300mb pagefile (Windows says that recommended is 4000+) and those 4 gigs of ram. Can I disable pagefile altoghether?

Alpha Protocol bluescreened me once (when I hit ctrl+esc) and Majesty 2 bluescreened while exiting the game. I was playing Majesty 2 (steam version) and steam was downloadin. I happened to check my modem and it was not blinking the light, so I wanted to see if there was somenthing wrong. Clicked exit game and wham, BSOD...

So, long story short, is pagefile even needed?

A pagefile is kind of like virtual RAM on your hard drive. It can cause bluescreens if it has become corrupted, yes. In those circumstances it would be best to disable, restart then re-enable to resolve that problem.

In your case I don't think that there's enough evidence to suggest it has been corrupted, and yes you do kind of need it. There may be other problems causing these crashes. But you could try disabling virtual memory just for peace of mind if nothing else. But I'd recommend re-enabling it again once you're done.

You don't technically NEED it but its never a bad thing to have since its helps contain data whenever the RAM overflows which it does no matter how much you have.

With your setup I'd suggest making a fixed size one of a gig though, save some space and you'll rarely run a gig over the ram capacity. Its what I was using when I ran XP with 4GB and never had a problem.

As for the bluescreen... Not very likely unless your hard drive or ram is dodgy and then you'd be more likely to get them semi-regularly. I'd say it was just some sloppy coding that windows ran into, got freaked out & went all bsod

Thanks guys, that cleared some things up :)

Dunno about stops but it limits fragmentation on the pagefile, yeah. Ideally when making a set pagefile it should be right after windows is installed and after defrags so it has the largest contiguous area of the disc to work with closest to the drive heads.

Worth doing any time but more effective the earlier you do it

Kay thanks. It is one of my first steps when I set up a new machine (not very often) and glad to know it's not a waste of time. :) Thanks!

Here's a link to a Pagefile Defragging program that someone else here gave me last month.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426

By habit going back to the mid 90s, I set it at a fixed size. One of the problems you can run into is that if you're running low on space and the swap file needs to grow you can have issues. I think other OSes generally put the swap on it's own partition.

I'm pretty sure XP will freak if there isn't one at all, but there's tweak guides to make it really small so it isn't used much.

That is disputable.
You don't need it to have a running system, but if you have no pagefile at all the OS can't write a kernel dump when it crashes. And those are often invaluable in finding the problem.
I never set the pagefile on the OS partition to less than 256MB for this reason, oh and of course I set to create a tiny dumpfile.

In the past i tend to keep my pagefile to about 1 GB.
I fondly remember playing titan quest and getting the rubber banding error.
A guy proposed a solution setting the pagefile to about 50 MB only.
Since hard drivers where slower then your ram it tended to rubber band when windows scribbled into that pagefile.
The rubber banding was gone in my case.
After playing it i forgot to reset it and nothing ever happened with it.

Come to think of it , since i installed win7 i never changed it back to 50mb.

So to summerise : i didn't have problems with a big pagefile nor a small one.

As I said its not needed but its bloody useful

I want to note here that when it comes to BSOD I am BSOD Meister.

I BSOD in my sleep and over top of my morning bowl of Cheerios.

But I overcame the addiction by correcting a few things:

1. First and foremost, nVidia and Radeon appear to use the same drivers for their newer cards that they do for their older cards. I've some difficulties with nVidia and many with Radeon until I realized that the cards that I'm using are obsolete to their latest updates so dropping way back in older drivers, back during the golden age of your video card will help tremendously and Radeon and nVidia both keep back logs.

2. If you have an old or underpowered power supply unit you'll both BSOD and drop reboot a lot.

3. Overheating is the biggest cause and that comes most from dust collected in your system, you should clean out the inside once every two or three months. Also, if you live in a country where a/c isn't necessary or common, during the summer your house is going to be warmer than what American made PC's were expected to handle. So get a stronger CPU fan and have a second one added to the inside of the case to compensate.

4. Defragging frequently is a must and even though every one else seems to be against them I also use reg and disk cleaning software like Win Utilities and Advanced System Care. You can also run Window's disk cleaner by going into My Computer, right clicking on the icon of your drive and entering Properties from the drop down menu. And finally, gonig to Start>Run> and typing %temp% will open your temporary folder which may contain a ton of files no longer needed and gumming up your system.

Keep the page file at 1.5 x the RAM you have. ;)