Adding Swap Space in Windows | Increase Windows paging size

One of the best reasons people prefer to use Linux is because it works well in low resource environments. I always create a swap partition from my hard drive when I am on a device with low memory. However, Windows has a similar feature. It is called increasing the paging size. Increasing the page size works like swap where inactive pages from the memory are cached on to the swap space on the hard drive. Now let us see how to do it in Windows.

Search for advanced system settings from the windows search.

Once you click on it, a new window will appear. In the window, move over to advanced settings.

Under the performance section, there will be a settings button as highlighted below. Click on that button.

A new pop up will appear, move over to its advanced settings. In the virtual memory section, click on the change button as highlighted in the image below.

This will fire up another popup. Looks like it’s raining popups today. Here by default, it will be set to automatically manage paging size for all drives. You need to uncheck that box since we will be manually configuring it.

Select the custom size, and set the initial and maximum sizes to whatever you like. I have 4 Gigs of physical RAM and as per my requirement, I have set the minimum to 1 and maximum to 4 GB.

Conclusion

So here we discussed how to increase the paging size on windows. This works very much like a swap partition in Linux. There isn’t a significant amount of performance boost, to be honest. The performance is slightly better in the sense that I am able to have more passive programs.

I am sure you understood each step If you get stuck somewhere just drop a comment and I’ll be there for you.