The screenshot below shows that my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 has a page file of 2432 MB. This will let you know where your page file is, and its usage. It does myriad things, but for our purposes, we are going to use it to modify the Page File.įrom a command prompt, run the following command: WMIC.exe is a command line tool that was developed to allow administrators to manage the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) from the command line (CLI). Great… but what if we want to modify these settings in Server Core? Or frankly, what if you have hundreds (or thousands) of systems that you want to configure? The answer is, as usual, Command Line (PowerShell can do it too I am sure… I haven’t looked). So, in Server with a GUI (or Desktop Experience, or whatever you want to call it) it is easy to open the Virtual Memory tab under Advanced System Properties and change the size, change where it sits, and so on. If you try to use diskpart to clean a drive that holds the Paging File, it will fail. Recently a client of mine discovered different, when he formatted a server and then discovered that the Paging File was placed on the D drive, because it had more room. Have you ever wondered what happens when you format a server (or any Windows system) with a small bootable drive, and a large secondary drive? Why would you? It shouldn’t matter, right?
