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I have a Lenovo T410 ThinkPad running Windows 7 Professional as the host OS, and Windows XP Professional running as a guest OS under Windows 7 Virtual PC.

I am thinking of installing a 128GB SSD to host the Virtual PC, but XP does not support the SSD TRIM command, whereas Windows 7 does. In addition, I was thinking of using that same SSD to support some caching of the Windows 7 environment.

  1. Is it possible, under Windows 7 with a multiple drive configuration, to specify things such as the drive location of Windows 7 virtual memory?
  2. Assuming it is, since both Windows XP and Windows 7 would be accessing the same drive, if I put some Windows 7 files there, would the TRIM support available under Windows 7 effectively handle the TRIM function for the whole drive? Or am I missing something here?
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Your question could use a bit of clean up, I'll attempt that when done. For now...

With all versions of Windows from at least 2000, you can assign a different drive for the page file

  1. Right-click on My Computer and click on Properties
  2. Vista/Windows 7 and server versions: Select the Continue or Yes option for UAC
  3. Select Advanced System Settings
  4. Select Settings under Performance
  5. Select Advanced
  6. Select Change
  7. Choose a different drive for the page file

For the guest being Windows XP, it will not control TRIM unless it has full access to the hard drive and the hard drive is removed from Windows 7. This does not sound like what you have. Virtual Machines typically use Virtual Hard Drives, which are just files. I say typically, because there are some products that will let a VM control an actual device.

Windows 7 should control the actual device for you, and Windows XP should not know the difference in most cases

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  • Like, thank you for your comments. However..., I think there are a few more complications. Part of what I failed to mention is that, as I understand, one always needs to have a copy of pagefile.sys on the boot drive in order to handle system failure / recovery issues, and if one does what you have said to change the pagefile location, , there will still be
    – Norman G. Litell
    Aug 19, 2012 at 16:22
  • Luke, thank you for your comments. However..., I think there are a few more complications related to the pagefile location. I found the following reference after I posted my question. Your thoughts on this reference would be appreciated... superuser.com/questions/237813/…
    – Norman G. Litell
    Aug 19, 2012 at 16:35
  • @NormanG.Litell Moving the Page File off your boot partition is supported in Windows 7, and it is the expected behaviour if you install Windows 7 onto an SSD and it detects a hard disk drive during install. Windows is smart enough now to realize when to use an SSD, when to use a hard drive, and it will let you put it on another drive. I have done it numerous times, and the worst case scenario during a BSOD, you see the error message and fix the other issue with that. This WILL NOT break Windows though
    – Canadian Luke
    Aug 19, 2012 at 18:19

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