DisablePagingExecutive in registry = beneficial for video editing?

[David Ho]

After reading some information on this registry file, it appears "DisablePagingExecutive" would improve imperformance on some, but it also appears that it would DECREASE performance if you have HUGE unused memory/vice versa (I am still unclear on this). I have 1GB of memory and was wondering should I set it to 1 (disabled) or leave it at 0 (default). I can always change it back to 1 or 0, so no backup is needed, really.

Has anyone used this and noticed it would be better or worse for video editing?

[Rob Lohman]

David,

I would not fiddle with any settings like those. I consider myself
a power Windows users (since I have a lot of low-level Windows
experience and have done years of programming on the Windows
platform) and I'm not even changing such settings in the registry.
Why? Because they usually make no difference in realworld use.

In the past it was a black art to crunch out every last bit of
performance from your machine. This was also interesting
because it had a much larger impact on things then it does today.
Why? Because today drivers, operating systems, hardware are
much more refined and also much much faster. Any of such
changes are thus having a much smaller impact compared to
the whole system.

So should we just use all default settings? No. Some settings
are still eating lots of CPU cycles and memory like indexing
services, unneeded processes, screensavers, active desktops
and things like the Windows XP themes etc.

I've responded in a lot of threads were you are asking basic
information about PC's / Windows and things surrounding that.
Given this I don't think you have enough knowledge to truly
understand what you are changing here. I would really
investigate what this does exactly (and understand it) before
actually doing something like this.

I visited a Microsoft page on this setting and they even warn
that this might result in an unbootable system if you don't have
a large amount of RAM (they don't define how large this amount
must be). I also doubt this directive will have much effect since
Windows will probably keep the drivers in memory for as long
as possible, especially if you have plenty of RAM.

But if you want you can try the setting out and do some tests
to see how much difference it makes. Do keep in mind that in
the worst case you might need to re-install your PC.

Fiddling with such major settings of the basis of an OS is never
a good idea without proper knowledge and research. There are
a lot of sites out there that just tell you to change this and that
setting which is not needed any more today or does a lot more
damage then it does good in my opinion.

[Glenn Chan]

The only tweak I find worth doing is overclocking.

The software tweaks in Windows don't really do much. Cleaning up your system definitely helps (get rid of PIO mode, get rid of programs that use more than 0% CPU cycles as reported in task manager, etc.).

"DisablePagingExecutive"

Is this supposed to diable the page file so that you use RAM instead? If so, then you probably shouldn't do it. Some NLEs hog up a lot of RAM and you will get into trouble when your page file is contending with your NLE for RAM.

[Rob Lohman]

No, it is meant to not page out drivers. A driver can tell windows
whether parts of it can be paged out to virtual memory or not.
If so, Windows can decide to do this. I'm assuming it will only
do this if memory is really short or the driver hasn't been used
for some period (ie a scanner driver for example?).

You can turn of normal paging by simply not having a swapfile
if I'm not mistaken. Not recommended though!