Improve performance by running the Windows Kernel in RAM

It’s a given that anything that runs in RAM will be faster than an item that has to access the hard drive and virtual memory. Do you know that you can set the kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code to remain in the RAM. This basically means the operating system itself will run from RAM!

Rather than have the kernel use the slower page file, use this tip to create and set the RAM as its permanent location. Note that you should ONLY do this if you have a large amount of RAM, preferably 4GB or higher. Do not change this if you do not have enough RAM.

You can test this by loading all the applications you plan to use and then going to the Performance tab in Task Manager and making sure that the amount of physical RAM is greater than the Peak Commit Charge by at least 32 MB.

First open the Registry Editor by typing “regedit” in the Run panel:

Edit the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive

Set the value to 1 to disable paging and have the kernel run in RAM. The default “0” value lets the drivers and system code can be paged to disk as needed while the “1” value keeps the drivers and system code remain in physical memory.

Finally, exit the registry and reboot for the changes to take in effect.

Setting this value to 1 is useful when debugging drivers, because all of the code and data is always memory resident. It also improves performance on machines with a lot of memory, because it prevents disk reads to get code or data.

Again, if you have more than a 4GB of RAM and you don’t run super heavy applications, setting the value of this key to 1 could improve your system’s performance.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!