Information About Defragmenting the Windows Paging File

This article contains information about defragmenting the Windows 95/98 paging file.

You cannot safely and effectively defragment the Windows 95/98 paging file. Fragmentation does not noticeably impact performance, because of the way Windows uses the paging file.

The most effective method to make the Windows paging file contiguous is to defragment the free space on the disk. This allows the paging file to dynamically shrink and grow in the contiguous free space.

For example, when you first start Windows, the paging file is small in size. When you start some programs, the paging file can grow about 50 megabytes (MB) or more regardless of the physical memory installed in the computer. When you close all the programs running on your computer, the paging file can shrink to about 15 MB.

Windows pages through the paging file in 4-kilobyte (KB) blocks, even if the paging file is contiguous.

For example, if Windows reads 40 KB of contiguous space from the disk, the paging file is actually read 10 separate times, once for each 4-KB block.

For information about the Microsoft Windows Disk Defragmenter tool, please click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: