What happens if i disable virtual memory

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By disabling it, you are forcing Windows to keep everything in much faster RAM all the time. The problem with this logic is that it only really affects a single scenario: switching to an open application that you haven't used in a while won't ever grind the hard drive when the pagefile is disabled.

It's not going to actually make your PC faster, since Windows will never page the application you are currently working with anyway. The big problem with disabling your pagefile is that once you've exhausted the available RAM, your apps are going to start crashing, since there's no virtual memory for Windows to allocate—and worst case, your actual system will crash or become very unstable.

When that application crashes, it's going down hard —there's no time to save your work or do anything else. In addition to applications crashing anytime you run up against the memory limit, you'll also come across a lot of applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled.

For instance, you really won't want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. You'll also notice some other strange, indefinable behavior when your pagefile is disabled—in my experience, a lot of things just don't always work right.

If you've got plenty of RAM in your PC, and your workload really isn't that huge, you may never run into application crashing errors with the pagefile disabled, but you're also taking away from memory that Windows could be using for read and write caching for your actual documents and other files. If your drive is spending a lot of time thrashing, you might want to consider increasing the amount of memory Windows uses for the filesystem cache , rather than disabling the pagefile.

Windows 7 includes a file caching mechanism called SuperFetch that caches the most frequently accessed application files in RAM so your applications will open more quickly. It's one of the many reasons why Windows 7 feels so much more "snappy" than previous versions—and disabling the pagefile takes away RAM that Windows could be using for caching.

Note: SuperFetch was actually introduced in Windows Vista. The next piece of bad advice that you'll see or hear from would-be system tweakers is to create a separate partition for your pagefile-which is generally pointless when the partition is on the same hard drive.