You are the administrator of 20 Windows XP Professional computers. Each computer has one hard disk that has three volumes named C, D, and E. Each volume is 4 GB in size and has approximately 1 GB of available space. The total physical memory of each computer is 196 MB in size. The paging file on each computer is located on drive D. A user named Andrea reports that every day, one hour after she starts her Windows XP Professional computer, the computer appears to perform very slowly for 15 seconds. This always happens after she receives an error message stating that the system is low on virtual memory. You want to improve the performance of Andrea’s computer. You do not want to install additional memory. What should you do?
A.
Increase the initial size of the paging file.
B.
Move the current paging file to the system drive.
C.
Increase the Buffers setting in the Config.sys file.
D.
Enable the Adjust for best performance of: System cache memory usage option.
Explanation:
The virtual memory is reported low. Then the computer performs slowly for a short time period. No performance decrease is reported after this. It is most likely that the paging file is full when this message appears and then the size of the paging file is increased. During this operation the computer performs somewhat slowly.
The initial size of the paging file seems to be too low. By increasing it to an appropriate setting, it would not have to grow, and the error message and the short decreased performance interval would disappear.
Note: The default setting of the size of the paging file is 1.5 times amount of the RAM in the system.
Incorrect Answers:
B: The page file should be placed on a separate partition than the operating system, not the system partition, for better performance. Placing it on the system drive, the default selection, would not improve performance.
C: This is a setting used in older operating systems. It is no longer used.
D: The System cache option should be selected if your computer is used primarily as a server, or if you use programs that require a larger cache. This is not the case in this scenario.
Press, Redmond, 2002, Chapter 10, Lesson 3