Optimize Windows XP RAM speed (DisablePagingExecutive)




If you have a large amount of ram (at least 1 GB or more physical memory) you can improve Windows memory performance by preventing the hard drive being used for caching. By keeping data in memory instead of paging sections of RAM to hard disk improves system performance and also reduces the hard drive swappage.
You can do this Windows XP trick if you disable Paging Executive (DisablePagingExecutive) in Windows Registry. According to the Mocrosoft the DisablePagingExecutive specifies whether kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code can be paged to disk when not in use. Setting this value to 1 let all of the data to be memory resident. It also improves performance on machines with a lot of memory, because it prevents disk reads to get code or data.

Value 0 - Drivers and system code can be paged to disk as needed.
Value 1 - Drivers and system code must remain in physical memory.

Click Start, click "Run..." and type "regedit"

In Registry Editor goto: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] and change the value of DisablePagingExecutive from 0 to 1 in Windows registry:

Optimize Windows XP RAM speed (DisablePagingExecutive)


This  forces the Windows kernel components and all the device drivers to stay and run in the memory instead of running from the cached hard disk. Because the memory operations are very fast compared to the hard disk caching this may increase a system performance.

Use this trick to increased memory performance only if you have enough free and unused physical memory that can support the kernel components, device drivers and applications to be resident in RAM. Do not use this Windows XP trick if you have integrated graphic card.

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