SillyDog701

[XPNOOB]

What are paging files?

Why is my Temporary Internet Files folder growing to 460+ Mbs, and when empty, it's still 2.5Mb.

How can I clear them both?

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

[Don_HH2K]

Paging files are files that Windows uses as if they were RAM -- except that they're located on your hard drive instead of in RAM. You can't clear these out, since they're exact dumps of RAM; for instance, if you had a 512MB paging file, then the file is always 512MB, as it's storing both the data and the free space in the file. You can vary the size of the paging file in Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Advanced, but it's usually best to let Windows manage it for you instead of specifying a size yourself if you don't know what you're doing.

IE cache can be a pain. You can clear it from Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Delete Files, and you can set its maximum size in Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Settings (under "Temporary Internet Files"); if you're using IE full-time then I'd reccomend that you set it to 25 or 30MB, and if you aren't you can probably get away with 10MB. The default setting is susually somewhere around 500MB, and there's no need for it to do that.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 Donzilla/1.1PR1 (WML/1.3)

[iarp]

Paging files are files that Windows uses as if they were RAM -- except that they're located on your hard drive instead of in RAM. You can't clear these out, since they're exact dumps of RAM; for instance, if you had a 512MB paging file, then the file is always 512MB, as it's storing both the data and the free space in the file. You can vary the size of the paging file in Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Advanced, but it's usually best to let Windows manage it for you instead of specifying a size yourself if you don't know what you're doing.

Rule of thumb that i've learned is, Initial Size: (MB) is double whatever physical ram you currently have. and Maximum Size: (MB) is 4 times what ever physical ram you have. it also depends on how much hard drive space your willing to give up.

IE: Currently i have 4 HDD's and i do not use paging file on my main C:\ hard drive, leaving me three, my minimum is 1000MB(even tho i have 2GB of RAM) Max is 4096MB making me have just over 12GB of paging file

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1