I play a 3-D game on my laptop that uses about 1.2 GB of RAM, typically. The laptop has 6 GB of RAM, and Task Manager shows approximately 2.5 GB of RAM in use when my game is running.
I have read this thread about why Win 7 uses the page file when there is "free" RAM, and that Windows actually mucks around with the "free" RAM to try and make my future experience better.
However, the problem I have is that sometimes it decides to write some other app out to the pagefile, which causes my game to run very slowly for 30 - 60 seconds. (Apparently my laptop's HDD doesn't write very fast). I know this is what it's doing because I tab to Resource Monitor which I already had open, and see heavy writes to C:\pagefile.sys, but it is still showing only the 2.5 GB of RAM in use.
When I am playing my game I don't want it to try and second guess what I'm about to do, I just want my game to run optimally and preferably nothing else should write to the HDD at all. (My game does do a reasonable amount of HDD reading during normal gameplay, but little to no writing).
Is it possible to instruct Windows 8 to not try to be clever and page out other apps while my game is running?