Colin
06-15-04, 01:27 PM
I often find that Windows is temperamental; when you're playing nice it works flawlessly, but then all of a sudden it can throw temper tantrums that put a 2 year old to shame. And like any child, WindowsXP very rarely cleans up after itself. <BR>For instance, WindowsXP doesn't clear out the swap file before shutting down. This can cause serious security issues and lead to performance drops if the swap file is not optimized correctly. Luckily, with a few strokes of the keyboard we can make WindowsXP clean up in this case.<BR><BR>First, load up regedit (Start -> Run then type REGEDIT and press Ok). Now follow this path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager -> Memory Management and find the ClearPageFileAtShutdown DWORD. By default its value is 0 which means Windows does not clear out the page file when shutting down. We want to change the value to 1 and enable that feature. Once done, save and reboot the PC which will leave you with a clear page file every time you start the computer from now on. Please be aware however, if you use a large page file, shutting down may take a bit longer as the system has to clear the data first! <BR>