r/quicken•
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Windows Paging File settings change - life changing

Windows

I've used Quicken for 25+ years. I've always been obsessed with performance. I prioritze quicken in the graphics card, load quicken to a blank home page, load quicken as "Above Normal" process - all helped (in the mid-201xs there was also a bunch of .NET optimizations I've also implemented). I do, knowingly against Quicken's advice, run the file on a NAS for multi-PC access and backup purposes. I'm a network guy and I have to do packet captures to diagnose apps a lot... the performance hit is negligible after testing both scenarios. I do get a performance hit when my systems are doing backups on the NAS but I know why and it doesn't bother me. But what was really a game changer was paging file settings for windows. I don't let Windows automatically manage the page file for me and in past Windows versions I had a low page file setting probably due to past hardware (I use custom PCs). I'm now on Windows 11, with 64GB RAM and 16 CPUs (after hyperthreading) with a 2TB SSD. I changed my page file to minimum 16GB and max 32GB, the performance improvement across all software was huge.

Steps:

Never put a pagefile on a mechanical HDD (in which case let Windows automatically manage the page file size)
Windows 10/11 Settings-> System->About
Win 10 ”System info” (in top right corner) then “Advanced system settings” (left hand side)
Win 11 “Advanced System settings” 
“Advanced” tab->”Performance” section->”Settings…” button
“Advanced” tab->”Virtual memory” section->”Change…” button
(disable) “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives”
Select “C: [OS]” (where the OS is), click “Custom size”, enter “initial size” to 16384MB (16GB) and Maximum size (MB) of e.g. 32768MB (32GB)(e.g. 1024x#GB)
Click “Set” button
<only takes effect after reboot>
Verify in powershell with: 
Get-CimInstance Win32_PageFileSetting | Select-Object Name, InitialSize, MaximumSize

Posted Aug 1, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

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