why not just look at the PF usage performance tab in the task manager
Because that has nothing to do with actual pagefile usage. It's the system's commit charge, not how much pagefile is currently in use.
The only way I see that could be true, is if there is no more available ram.
That's the way it should work in theory but not quite the way it works out in reality.
When I decided to "Disable paging executive" in my laptop's registry, the computer would freeze with the 100% RAM use (2GB) while using Adobe Reader.
That's a separate issue. Disable paging executive just disables the kernel's ability to evict kernel code from memory, so unused drivers that sit idle can't be removed and will just waste that memory. It doesn't help performance and just ends up wasting a few megs of memory.
EDIT: See, I understand it like if it was a Dam, and to control the water level, you might have to let some thru the dam, so it doesn't overflow.
Execpt that the pagefile is one of a few repositories for "water" and is only used to store certain types of "water".
Just FYI, this is my current memory usage according to Everest:
Luckily virtual memory doesn't really have any correlation to pagefile usage, so you can have TBs of VM allocated without ever touching your pagefile. Look at your pagefile usage, 429M was the peak.
what do u mean you would need a lot of ram for that can someone give a PF noob the general on how page file relates to actual physical ram? heres mine from everest 2007:
It doesn't relate to physical memory at all, it's just a temporary holding place for data. And only for data that has no backing store, if data in memory is already associated with a file (i.e. mmap()'d file, executable, shared library, etc) then the VM will just evict the data from memory when it has to since it can page the data back in from whatever file it got it from in the first place.
Most likely, the computer will freeze, and you will have to clear the RAM - reboot!
If your OS is smart it won't, for example on Linux when memory gets critically low it kills a process to free up memory. I don't believe Windows has a facility like that but if you wait long enough the paging storm will usually finish, probably because the program wanting all of that memory will crash since memory allocations started to fail, and you'll be able to use the machine again. And that can easily happen even with a pagefile if a process goes nuts or you grossly underestimate your memory requirements but it would still be foolish to run without one.
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