This can't possibly be happening on three different systems unless you are doing something wrong ... and I've never seen this happen before. No offense intended, as I'm sure that you know. I just can't picture three systems having the same strange problem for no particular reason. I've never encountered a bug in the OS of this kind, not in a couple of hundred installations.
I could be wrong, but my gut doesn't think so.
If you leave the paging file on the system partion (C
, clear the check box for System Managed Size, change the size, click Set, and then reboot, does the paging file again return to the 20MB size after Windows reloads?
In your previous attempts, after changing the size and location, has Windows prompted you to reboot?
For 512MB of RAM, the default size for the paging file should be 768MB minimum and 1536MB maximum. That's 1.5 x the size of the physical RAM, and then the upper limit is double the minimum setting.
I wouldn't attempt to move the paging file to another partition until you figure out why you can't change the size of the file in the first place. And with one disk, it's not necessary to isolate the file on a separate partition ... placing it on a partition that is farther away from the top of the disk will only slow down the system when it needs to read/write to the file.
With 512MB of RAM, the file isn't going to accessed frequently, in any case.
One one hand, there isn't really any need to move the file to a separate partition unless you have two hard disks, and are running NTFS. The paging file doesn't tend to get fragmented in FAT32, even if you move it.
On the other hand, I have two paging files. One is 2MB, and is in the system partition. The second is 766MB minimum and 1536MB maximum, and in the first partition at the top of the slaved drive. But this really isn't for performance ... it's to eliminate having the file on the system partition when I make an image of it when backing up the computer. A 768MB paging file adds an entire CD-R to the image (and a little more), which I'd rather avoid. But as for performance, it really doesn't make enough of a difference to matter.
Note. The reason I have a 2MB paging file in the system partition is because this is what Windows requires to boot, without getting error messages ... or refusing to boot at all. If the second hard drive failed, I could still get into Windows and manually change the file size.
Toejam31
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