Russian President Vladimir Putin told a press conference for Russian and foreign journalists today that Russia’s response to the US setting up ballistic defense system in Europe would be unpredicted and highly effective. He explained that Russian experts doubted the fact that the US National Missile Defense System (NMDS) being deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic was aimed at combating threats from Iran and North Korea. According to the Russian leader those countries have only medium-range ballistic missiles. Hence, Putin assured journalists that Russia was planning to construct new-generation missiles, which would not be detected by NMDS.

The president added that the US plans to deploy the NMDS in Eastern Europe were not connected with Russia’s increasing military power. Putin also believes that US sanctions against Russian defense companies to be unfair in terms of competition.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding an annual news conference in the Kremlin to comment on Russia’s home and foreign policy.In opening remarks, Putin said wages increased 13.3 percent last year, while pensions were raised by 5.4 percent. This is not too much compared with some other countries, but pension age is lower in Russia, he noted. The President pointed to a lower natural decrease in population, expressing hope that this trend would continue. He stressed the need to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor by boosting economic growth. Russia’s GDP grew 6.9 percent last year, up from 6.5 percent in 2004. Inflation stood at 9 percent as planned, Putin said. In future, it should be reduced to 4 percent, he added. Another achievement is that Russia paid the Soviet-era debt in 2006.The past year could be called “the year of IPOs”, Putin said. Russian companies floated about $10 billion worth of stock. He said capitalization of Russia’s stock market climbed by more than 80 percent in 2006, and it continues to grow. In the corporate sector, capitalization grew by over 90 percent.Economic growth was fuelled by both external and domestic factors. It was the result of the government and the Central Bank’s efforts, he said.

Russia is paying $4.2bn a year for oil and gas transit, President of Russia Vladimir Putin said at a press conference for Russian and foreign journalists. If this amount is set to increase, Russia will be forced to seek alternative ways to export energy resources.

      The president noted that the relations with transit countries have deteriorated because all earlier transit routes had crossed the USSR or the so-called Eastern block countries. Now that all those states have become independent they want to make profit on the transit. Putin stressed that Russia would take further steps to shift to market relations with the CIS.

      With regard to gas and oil prices for Belarus, Putin said the issue had been brought up some three years earlier. Yet, Russia abstained from charging a market price at that time not wishing to aggravate the situation in Belarus before the elections there.

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group”

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women’s studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women’s statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

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Daily effects of white privilege

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.

28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.

29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.

30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.

31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.

32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.

38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.

43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.

45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.

47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.

48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.

49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

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Elusive and fugitive

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.

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Earned strength, unearned power

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their “Black Feminist Statement” of 1977.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.

This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.

I have started writing a series of articles explaining how to do source control and the best practices thereof. See below for links to the individual chapters in this series. The Introduction explains my motivations and goals for writing this series.

Please note: This is a work in progress. I plan to be adding new chapters over time, and I may also be revising the existing chapters as I go along.

Printer-friendly version:  Sorry folks, but I currently do not have this material available in a form which is more suitable for paper.  I am planning to eventually publish this material as a book. When that happens, a link will appear here.

Chapter 0: Introduction

Our universities don’t teach people how to do source control.  Our employers don’t teach people how to do source control.  SCM tool vendors don’t teach people how to do source control.  We need some materials that explain how source control is done.  My goal for this series of articles is to create a comprehensive guide to help meet this need.

Chapter 1: Basics

Our discussion of source control must begin by defining the basic terms and describing the basic operations.

Chapter 2: Checkins

In this chapter, I will explore the various situations wherein a repository is modified, starting with the simplest case of a single developer making a change to a single file.

Chapter 3: File Merge

Many software teams have discovered that the tradeoff here is worth the trouble.  Concurrent development can bring substantial gains in the productivity of a team.  The extra effort to deal with merge situations is usually a small price to pay.

Chapter 4: Repositories

A file system is two-dimensional:  its space is defined by directories and files.  In contrast, a repository is three-dimensional:  it exists in a continuum defined by directories, files and time.  An SCM repository contains every version of your source code that has ever existed.  The additional dimension creates some rather interesting challenges in the architecture of a repository and the decisions about how it manages data.

Chapter 5: Working Folders

The repository is the official archive of our work.  We treat our repository with great respect.  In contrast, we treat our working folder with very little regard.  It exists for the purpose of being abused.  Our working folder starts out worthless, nothing more than a copy of the repository.  If it is destroyed, we have lost nothing, so we run risky experiments which endanger its life.

Chapter 6: History

There is nothing endearing about a development team that can’t find something when they need it.  A good SCM tool must do more than just keep every version of everything.  It must also provide ways of searching and viewing and sorting and organizing and finding all that stuff.

Chapter 7: Branches

Nelly has a friend who has a cousin with a neighbor who knows somebody whose life completely fell apart after they tried using the branch and merge features of their source control tool.  So Nelly refuses to use branching at all.

Chapter 8: Merge Branches

Successfully using the branching and merging features of your source control tool is first a matter of attitude on the part of the developer. No matter how much help the source control tool provides, it is not as smart as you are. You are responsible for doing the merge. Think of the tool as a tool, not as a consultant.

Chapter 9: Source Control Integration with IDEs

Just as a spice rack belongs near the stove, source control should always be available where the developer is working.

Here’s a list of chapters I am thinking about writing:

• A chapter on integration with bug-tracking and automated builds
• A chapter on common mistakes people make when using source control.
• A chapter on remote access (client/server, binary deltas, security, …)
• A chapter on importing from one source control tool to another
• A chapter on cross-platform issues
• A chapter on writing custom tools which access a source control server
• A chapter on miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else (share, pin, cloak, shadow folders, email notifications, browser-based clients, keyword expansion, …)

PXELINUX is a SYSLINUX derivative, for booting Linux off a network server, using a network ROM conforming to the Intel PXE (Pre-Execution Environment) specification. PXELINUX is not a program that is intended to be flashed or burned into a PROM on the network card; if you want that, check out Etherboot ( http://www.etherboot.org/).  

{ PXELINUX Questions }

Memory tweaking is an important part of the System Administrator’s responsibilities. Having too much memory won’t hurt you, but this is something we cannot expect to have all the time. This page will give you some working tips on memory management for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Warning: Before you start working with these tips you should read my Before you begin page.

Thanks to reader Perris Calderon for the heads-up on some needed fixes on this page (3/02/2003)

Parts of this page have information taken from MS MVP Alex Nichol’s excellent article about XP Virtual Memory found HERE. Other pieces of information were collected from a blog written by Mike Lee, HERE.

What is Virtual Memory?

In a 32-bit computer, the memory addresses are 32 bits long and stored as binary (base 2) numbers. There are approximately 4 billion possible different 32-bit binary numbers (2^32=4,294,967,296). Because of this, there is a 4GB limit for addressable memory in a 32-bit computer.

A program instruction on an Intel 386 or later CPU can address up to 4GB of memory, using its full 32 bits. Each process is assigned an address space of 4GB of virtual memory, regardless of the amount of available physical memory. Each process is isolated from the rest and has its own 4GB address space. This means that the 4GB addressability limit applies on a per-application basis, not across all applications taken together.

This is normally far more than the RAM of the machine. The amount of physical memory on the computer is not related to the amount of memory address space. If a computer has 256MB of physical memory, there is still a 4GB memory address space, and if a computer has 8GB of physical memory, there is still a 4GB memory address space.

Applications are not allowed direct access to physical memory. When an application requests more memory, Windows maps some physical memory (as long as some is available) into the process’s address space.

The hardware provides for programs to operate in terms of as much as they wish of this full 4GB space as Virtual Memory, those parts of the program and data which are currently active being loaded into Physical Random Access Memory (RAM). Windows maintains several tables that keep track of all of this, and the application knows only about the virtual memory address.

The processor itself then translates (‘maps’) the virtual addresses from an instruction into the correct physical equivalents, doing this on the fly as the instruction is executed. The processor manages the mapping in terms of pages of 4KB each – a size that has implications for managing virtual memory by the system.

Why do I need page file optimization?

Optimizing your page file when you’re running low on RAM is always a good idea. When all physical RAM in a computer is in use, Windows starts using the hard disk as if it were additional RAM. This is why we have a Pagefile (also called the swap file). Because RAM memory is a lot more faster than the hard disk, whenever the computer begins to use the Pagefile to relieve memory pressure, we begin to experience a drastic performance degradation.

One of the most effective things you can do to improve performance is ensure that there is enough RAM available to avoid frequent paging (swapping) of memory contents between disk and RAM.

This means that the actual limit on the memory used by all applications is the amount of RAM installed plus the maximum size of the Pagefile.

How much swap space do you need? That depends the amount of RAM you have and the programs you use. The rule of the thumb is 1.5 times the amount of system memory, unless you have too much load on your system.

Can the Virtual Memory be turned off on a really large machine?

Strictly speaking Virtual Memory is always in operation and cannot be ‘turned off’. What is meant by such wording is ‘set the system to use no page file space at all’.

This would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of Virtual memory space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use – the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it – if there is not, they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use.

Do you have any specific tweaking tips?

Here are some basic rules you should follow:

• First and most important – Add more RAM. No, you do NOT need to put in 4GB of RAM, but if your computer constantly utilizes X MB of memory, then make sure you have at least X MB of RAM available for it, and preferably more. There is no point in overloading a computer with graphic applications and limiting it to 256MB of RAM. While the applications will probably work, your performance will be lowered to the ground. Adding enough RAM will ensure that all the required memory used will indeed be used from the RAM, and not supplemented from the Pagefile.

• Move the Pagefile off the disk that holds your system and boot partitions to another fast and dedicated hard disk. If you do put the file elsewhere, you should leave a small amount on C: – an initial size of 2MB with a Maximum of 50 is suitable – so it can be used in emergency. Without this, the system is inclined to ignore the settings and either have no page file at all (and complain) or make a very large one indeed on the C: drive.

• Format the partition where the page file is placed with NTFS and a 4kb cluster size (which is in fact the default setting for an NTFS partition).

• Have the initial size be at least 1.5 times bigger than the amount of physical RAM. Do NOT make the Pagefile smaller than the amount of physical RAM you’ve got installed on your system.

• Make its initial size as big as the maximum size. Although this will cause the Pagefile to occupy more HD space, we do not want it to start off small, then having to constantly grow on the HD. Writing large files (and the Pagefile is indeed large) to the HD will cause a lot of disk activity that will cause performance degradation. Also, since the Pagefile only grows in increments, you will probably cause Pagefile fragmentation, adding more overhead to the already stressed HD.

• Do not place multiple paging files on different partitions on the same physical disk drive.

• If you have a RAID-0 (Stripe Set) array, use it to store the Pagefile.

• Avoid putting a paging file on a fault-tolerant drive, such as a mirrored volume (RAID-1) or a RAID-5 volume. Paging files do not need fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant systems suffer from slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.

• If you use Windows XP and Fast User Switching, there are special considerations: When a user is not active, there will need to be space available in the page file to ‘roll out’ his or her work: therefore, the page file will need to be larger. Only experiment in a real situation will establish how big, but a start point might be an initial size equal to half the size of RAM for each user logged in.

If you can spare an extra Hard Disk (preferably a fast one) or if you have some free HD space on your system (again, preferably on a fast HD, and NOT on the HD that’s holding the SYSTEM or DATA partitions) I’d suggest you use it for the sole purpose of the Pagefile. Remember that using another partition on the same SYSTEM or DATA HD will not improve your system’s performance at all. To do that you’ll need a separate fast HD, preferably connected to a different controller.

You can also improve performance by spreading your page file across multiple physical disks, don’t worry about the relative speeds of the hard drives Windows 2000/XP/2003 automatically selects the fastest drive to page memory to.

When creating page files, don’t confuse hard drives with partitions. You shouldn’t create page files on multiple partitions on the same hard drive. This set-up degrades system performance significantly because when Windows NT writes to these page files, the disk arm of the hard drive is forced to swing back and forth across the disk rather than being able to stay in the general area of the single page file. For those with IDE hard drives, it is recommended to place the page file on separate IDE channels.

Let’s say we have 512MB of RAM and we decided to create a Pagefile of 768MB.

In Windows 2000 go to My Computer, right click it and then choose Properties, go to the Advanced tab, click Performance Options, then click Change. Now you can view and set the parameters you need:

Notice how Windows 2000/XP/2003 place the Pagefile on the boot partition (I know it says “system” in the image, but still they reference it as the “boot” partition. In this case it’s both), the one the OS is installed on (in this case C:\). Windows 2000/XP/2003 also make the Pagefile’s initial size 1.5 times the size of the physical memory (RAM) installed. The maximum size is 3 times your RAM. Windows NT used a different calculation here.

You can write your settings in the initial and maximum boxes, and then click Set. You’ll have to reboot in order for the changes to take place. Note that you have to specify the *same* amount for both values. This will keep your Pagefile from resizing, fragmenting and eventually slowing itself down.

You can also divide the Pagefile between your physical disks (not partitions!) to speed up its performance. Select the required disk from the Drive list, write the sizes in the initial and maximum boxes, and then click Set. Repeat this for all the required drives.

In Windows XP go to My Computer, right click it and then choose Properties, go to the Advanced tab, click Performance Options, then click Settings.

Again click the Advanced tab and then in the Virtual Memory section click Change.

Now you can view and set the parameters you need.

Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.

Under Paging file size for selected drive, click Custom size, type a new paging file size in megabytes (MB) in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

If you decrease the size of either the initial or maximum paging file settings, you must restart your computer to see the effects of those changes. When you increase the paging file size, you typically do not need to restart your computer.

How big should my Pagefile be?

To have Windows choose the best paging file size, click System managed size. The recommended minimum size is equivalent to 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your system, and 3 times that figure for the maximum size. Example, if you have 256 MB of RAM, the minimum size would be 384, the maximum size would be 1152.

For best performance, do not set the initial size to less than the minimum recommended size under Total paging file size for all drives. The recommended size is equivalent to 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your system. Usually, you should leave the paging file at its recommended size, although you might increase its size if you routinely use programs that require a lot of memory.

To delete a paging file, set both initial size and maximum size to zero, or click No paging file. Microsoft strongly recommends that you do not disable or delete the paging file.

To determine your preferred Pagefile size you should monitor your system and see how much RAM and virtual memory it uses. Do a baseline monitoring for a week or so (you can skip the baseline or shorten its duration if you know exactly how much Pagefile you need) and see what was the largest amount of memory your system ever used. If you see it never gets close to the maximum amount of RAM you have installed – don’t worry. Your Pagefile is virtually left untouched (not exactly correct, because the system uses the Pagefile for some internal operations and it should keep it at around 5%-10% usage on normal systems). If, on the other hand, you see your system uses more memory than it physically has, this means it uses some Pagefile.

How much Pagefile does your system use?

You should first find out how much memory you’re using, and how much of it is on your disk.

Using System Monitor

One accurate way is by monitoring the %Usage Peak counter in the System Monitor tool (The peak usage of the Pagefile instance in percent):

Open Performance console from the Administrative Tools. Click System Monitor and then point at the PLUS (+) sign.

In the Add Counters dialog box open the Performance Objects drop-down list. Look for the Paging File object.

When you click that object select the %Usage counter and click Add.

Look at the graph. Notice if it’s steady or increasing in size (you might want to capture this data over a longer period of time – a week or more – by using the System Logs in the Performance Logs and Alerts sub-menu of the Performance console). Notice the Average counter.

Using Task Manager

Another (faster) way to find out is by using Task Manager:

Open Task Manager and go to the Performance Tab.

Notice the Physical Memory section. Look at the Total figures: 785904 K (that’s the amount of installed RAM).

How much RAM is available? 372924 K – more than half of the installed RAM. You’re doing ok for now.

How much memory is your system committed to? Look at the Commit Charge section, at the Total figures: 429604 K.

What was the largest amount of memory your system has ever committed itself to since the last boot? Look at the Peak figures: 453168 K. This means that you’re running close to your peak, and although your system has peaked to around 450000 K, it’s still far from using up its RAM. You’re ok for now.

Bill James MS MVP has a convenient tool, ‘WinXP-2K_Pagefile’, for monitoring the actual usage of the Page file, which can be downloaded here. A compiled Visual Basic version is available from Doug Knox’s site which may be more convenient for some users. The value seen for ‘Peak Usage’ over several days makes a good guide for setting the Initial size economically.

Now, since our system automatically sets its initial Pagefile size to 1.5 times the amount of RAM, you’re using 1152 MB or hard disk space on a Pagefile that’s not even used (Remember? You’re not even close to using ALL you RAM…) Seems like a lot of space to waste. You can safely lower the Pagefile size to around 700 MB, and you can safely assume you’ll never even touch it. The only drawback it losing the ability to create a dump file in case your system BSODs on you…

I’ve taken another snapshot, this time of a Windows XP computer:

Here the Peak was 758064 K, which is ALMOST all the RAM you have. You cannot tell if this was a one-time surge, or something you should expect all the time (here you do need a baseline to tell). You can only say that right now you’re safe because you’re only using 192992 K or memory out of 785904 K you have. But if you do see that the peak is something that always happens to you, you should set your Pagefile to the minimum of 1.5 times the RAM (which is in fact the default setting).

By the way, you can also see the current amount of memory used by looking at the lower right corner of Task Manager, where it says Commit Charge: 188M / 1426M.

This next snapshot is of a Windows Server 2003 which is having problems:

Had this been YOUR computer, then you could have had problems on your system. Here you’re using 530MB out of 934MB of memory you have (made of RAM + Pagefile). This means your system is relying on the Pagefile to operate. Here you must add more RAM ASAP, or at least configure the Pagefile for optimum use.

Are there any more tweaks that can be done to optimize the use and location of the Pagefile?

Yes. There are a few available options.

Registry Values:

Even when you set the values properly, some systems don’t retain your settings. If this happens, perform the following steps:

1. Start regedt32.exe (not regedit.exe)

2. Go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

1. Double-click PagingFiles. The entry will appear as

   D:\pagefile.sys 700 700

2. The first value is the location; the second is the minimum size; and the third is the maximum size.

3. Ensure the values are correct and click OK.

4. Reboot the machine.

Remotely changing Pagefile size and location:

You can also change the value of the Pagefile remotely by manipulating registry values.

Pagefile information is stored in the registry as a multi_string (so you HAVE to use regedt32.exe) and can be changed locally as follows:

1. Start the registry editor (regedt32.exe)

2. Move to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

1. Double click PagingFiles

2. There is one line for each pagefile, the format is:

   <location> <initial size> <maximum size>

   (e.g. C:\pagefile.sys 700 700)

3. Click OK

4. Close the registry editor

5. Reboot the machine

To change on another machine you should use the resource kit REG.EXE utility but the command below will replace the current Pagefile and will NOT check you have enough disk space so you may want to create a script that does check. Make sure the machine is rebooted after the change.

C:\> reg update “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles”=”<location> <initial size> <max size>” \\<remote machine>

For example:

C:\> reg update “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles”=”C:\pagefile.sys 700 700″ \\london.nwtraders.msft

Make sure you test this before trying to use on live machines.

Pagefile Fragmentation

If the Pagefile gets fragmented your system’s performance will decrease. System Internals has released PageDefrag, a free utility that shows fragmentation in the Pagefile and then offers the option of defragmentation at boot time.

The utility can be downloaded from HERE

Once you download just unzip the file and run pagedfrg.exe. Below is a sample output:

Group Policy Settings

There are a few Group Policy settings available for use.

Create a Pagefile:

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment

This setting determines which users and groups can create and change the size of a Pagefile. You can create a Pagefile by specifying a paging file size for a given drive in System Properties Performance Options.

Default: Administrators

Shutdown: Clear virtual memory Pagefile:

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

This setting determines whether the virtual memory Pagefile is cleared when the system is shut down. On a running system, the Pagefile is opened exclusively by the operating system, and it is well protected. However, systems that are configured to allow booting to other operating systems might have to make sure that the system Pagefile is wiped clean when this system shuts down. This ensures that sensitive information from process memory that might go into the Pagefile is not available to an unauthorized user who manages to directly access the Pagefile.

When this policy is enabled, it causes the system Pagefile to be cleared upon clean shutdown. If you enable this security option, the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) is also zeroed out when hibernation is disabled on a portable computer system.

Default: Disabled

Problems with Virtual Memory

It may sometimes happen that the system give ‘out of memory’ messages on trying to load a program, or give a message about Virtual memory space being low. Possible causes of this are:

• The setting for maximum size of the page file is too low, or there is not enough disk space free to expand it to that size.

• The page file has become corrupt, possibly at a bad shut-down. In the Virtual memory settings, set to have no page file, exit, shut down the machine and reboot. Delete PAGEFILE.SYS (on each drive if more than just C:), set the page file up again and reboot to bring it into use.

• The page file has been put on a different drive without leaving a minimal amount on C:.

• There is trouble with third party software. In particular, if the message happens at shutdown, suspect a problem with Symantec’s Norton Live update, for which there is a fix posted HERE.
  If it happens at boot and the machine has an Intel chipset, the message may be caused by an early version (before version 2.1) of Intel’s ‘Application Accelerator’. Uninstall this and then get an up-to-date version from Intel’s site.

• Possibly there is trouble with the drivers for IDE hard disks; in Device Manager, remove the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers (main controller) and reboot for Plug and Play to start over.

• With an NTFS file system, the permissions for the root directory of the drive where the page file is must give ‘Full Control’ to SYSTEM. If not, there is likely to be a message at boot that the system is ‘unable to create a page file’.

Open the cabinets and you know it’s time!  Pudding mixes perch on top of the cereal, showering down onto the head of a sleepy, squawking teen each morning.  To reach the oatmeal pan, you must shove aside a stack of Teletubbies videos, the bread machine pan and a glass jar of pickles.  The top of the refrigerator is a greasy, dusty jumble of unfinished crafts projects, the dog’s leash, empty prescription bottles, broken toys and fast-food drink cups.Time to declutter the kitchen!  Here are our best tips for streamlining and sorting kitchen clutter:

Adjust the attitude

Before you open a drawer, clear a counter or tackle a shelf, give yourself an attitude adjustment.  To successfully declutter the kitchen, harden your heart before you begin.

An efficient, convenient kitchen must be pared to the bone.  During the declutter process, resolve to dump delusions, sentiment, and indecision along with the expired coupons and never-used cookbooks.  

Repeat after me:  “To create a clean and organized kitchen, I will dare to dump it!”

Clear the decks and assemble your tools

Decluttering is an activity that takes time, thought and energy.  You’ll need every scrap of space and all your mental marbles for this activity, so begin with a clear deck and the tools you’ll use to do the job.

Clear the counters, empty the dishwasher and bring your kitchen to an  ordinary state of clean before you begin.  Fill a dishpan or sink with hot soapy water for quick clean-up and replacement of dusty items.

Together with clear counters, you’ll need a minimum of four boxes and a good assortment of garbage bags to begin.  Sturdy black plastic garbage bags not only hold lots of broken and discarded items, they also prevent Declutterer’s Remorse–the condition in which you second-guess your own decision to discard by retrieving items from the trash.  Out of sight is out of mind, so declutter right into opaque trash bags for best results.

Label boxes as follows:  Put Away (Kitchen), Put Away (Elsewhere), Give Away/Sell and Storage.  You’ll use one box for items that belong in another location in the kitchen, a second box for strays from other areas of the house.  Items for Goodwill or a yard sale find a home in the Give Away/Sell box, while household possessions that need to be stored are entrusted to the Storage box.  Trash belongs in trash bags, and quickly, too!

One step (drawer, cupboard or shelf) at a time

Once you get started, it’s hard to avoid decluttering all sides at once.  For example, you find a lone Christmas plate in the junk drawer, so you go to the high cabinet that holds the Christmas dishes, only to see a sack of whole oats that belongs in the cupboard where sits the bottle of window cleaner you forgot you stashed there while looking for the mop a few days ago … stop! 

Declutter a single shelf, drawer or cupboard at a time, no exceptions.  Use one of the boxes to hold items to be put away in another location in the kitchen, and assign a second box for rest-of-the-house put-aways.  Donations or items for storage go to their respective boxes.  Stick with your shelf until you’re done, then put away the items from the put-away boxes before moving on.  You’ll stay focused when you declutter one step at a time!

Decluttering step-by-step also provides a natural opportunity to break down a big job.  If you’re distracted by caring for small children, declutter one drawer or shelf per nap, deep-cleaning as you go.  Slow and steady will win the race, but a premature end to an over-ambitious kitchen declutter will spell all-out kitchen disaster for a very, very long time.

To delegate or not to delegate … that is the question

Should a would-be kitchen declutterer assist the aid of family or friends to haul out the mess?  There’s no one right answer.

The CEO will express a rare preference against involving family members in this task.  One of the hardest aspects of a kitchen declutter is confronting the reality that no, you are not going to become an artisan baker in the foreseeable future (not being at home long enough at any one time to proof a single batch of bread dough, this being soccer season).  Alone, you can pitch the dead sourdough starter, crusty crock and all, and spare yourself the discussion with a spouse that starts with the line, “But I thought you bought the bread machine so that you could bake bread every day?”  

Think again, though, about enlisting an unrelated clutter buddy for this job.  A trusted friend brings sufficient detachment to be a valid ally in the fight against the electric meat injector and the crème brulee caramelizer.  Choose a clutter buddy who is strong enough to point out that nobody, but nobody, needs a four-year collection of cracked margarine tubs.  His or her favorite word should be “Out!”  The help of such a friend, is help indeed.

Review the rules

Each item you encounter as you declutter requires a decision.  Many decisions are easy to make:  dishes, pots, and utensils in daily use stay right where they are until you’re ready to re-organize kitchen centers.

Other items are easy, too.  Either they’re strays that belong elsewhere in the house (drop them in the Put Away Elsewhere box) or they’re plain-and-simple trash, like expired coupons, that can be dumped straight into a black plastic garbage bags.

But, oh, that middle ground!  Electric french-fry fryers (complete with a filling of hardened two-year-old grease).  Give-away gelatin molds in the shape of a map of the United States.  Bike bottles from sixteen worthy walk-a-thon fundraisers.  Pans you don’t use, dishes you don’t like, and specialty cooking tools that are more trouble to clean than to use–so you don’t use them.

Bust the decision dam by holding each item in your hand and asking yourself a simple question:  “When have I last used this item?”  The answers will guide your declutter decisions:

• “Never!”  Out it goes, to the trash or for donation or a yard sale.  I don’t care if your mother-in-law did give you that complete cake decorating set (despite, or perhaps because of, your new stint at Weight Watchers).  If you don’t use it, it has no place in a lean, mean kitchen.  Donate it to your favorite charity thrift shop and allow some other family the consumer thrill of possessing a genuine advertised-on-TV potato peeler machine.
• “Within the last year.”  Out it goes, with one exception.  Holiday cooking tools used only once a year, like cookie presses or springerle molds, may be give house room if, and only if, they are removed from active kitchen storage.  You haven’t space in a working kitchen for holiday one-timers, so store them with the holiday decorations in a box marked Holiday Cooking Tools.  All others?  If you’ve only used it once a year, why do you have it at all?  Out! 
• “Within the last month.”  Candidate for a keeper.  Deciding where the item should live will come during another phase of the kitchen clean-up.
• “Yesterday!”  Watch for these items; they’re the backbone of a organized kitchen.  Keep.  Clean them if necessary and put away where you found them.  They will be the star performers of your new improved kitchen environment. 

The devil’s in the details

No more stalling; it’s time to begin.  Pick a starting point, and begin at the top.  Top shelves of anything are apt to resemble an unknown landscape at the back of the moon, so climb up on a sturdy step-stool to meet them face to face.

It is at this point that you understand the truth about best laid plans going oft astray.  Perched at eye level with the top shelf of your mixing and spices cupboard, you find a dirty flour sifter, bags of stale Christmas candy intended for last year’s (never-built) gingerbread house, a wadded and soiled T-shirt that apparently traveled there via an son’s fascination with the process of “stuffing” a basketball hoop, and a motley jumble of lidless canning jars.

One item at a time, you begin the declutter process.  The flour sifter, a legitimate inhabitant of the shelf, is tucked into the empty dishwasher to be washed and returned.  The candy is discarded straight into a black plastic garbage bag.  No tasting.  No saving for next year.  No side trips to look up the gingerbread house recipe or daydream about Christmas Future.  Remember the mantra, and dare to dump it!

The T-shirt belongs in the laundry (make a mental note to talk to the T-shirt owner about playing basketball in the house) so it is tossed into the Put Away Elsewhere box. 

Only the canning jars require a considered decision.  Have you made jelly, jam, preserves or canned tomatoes within the last year?  Did you assemble gifts in a jar for Christmas gifts last year?  If you answered yes to either question, you may wash and replace the jars.  Answer is no?  Out they go!  Calm any qualms by surveying the nice piece of shelf real estate they’ll leave behind on their trip to the yard sale.

One by one, continue down the shelves, through the drawers, into the cupboards and around the room.  Declutter with a vengeance, because the next stage of the kitchen clean-up, deep-cleaning, will move faster the fewer items you have to work around.

Advanced kitchen declutter tips:

Okay, the pep talk wasn’t enough.  You’re experiencing pangs of distress at the thought of decluttering the electric pasta machine.  Even though you haven’t used it in the four years you’ve had it, you can’t bear to part with it–or with seventeen dozen other must-have, don’t-use kitchen toys.

These back-up strategies can help would-be declutterers with more desire than willpower.  If “Dare to dump it!” falls short, try these secondary methods to boost yourself over the dump-it hump.

Box and banish

You can’t, just can’t, part with that set of Twelve Days of Christmas cookie cutters.  Despite the fact that you bought them the year your 15-year-old was born and have never used them since, you just know that someday you’ll create an heirloom to be treasured by future generations using only salt dough, red ribbon, and these very cookie cutters. 

You need to break the thrall of this particular fantasy before you can dispose of the cookie cutters.  So, you’ll box and banish–a painless method of breaking the ties that bind this and every other compelling kitchen daydream to your limited cabinet space. 

Place the cookie cutters and every other pang-in-the-heart item that you don’t quite use but can’t really part with into a large box.  At the end of the kitchen declutter session, seal the box with packing tape, label it “Kitchen Declutter” and date it.  Take it to the attic, garage or storage area and leave it there.

Come back in six months to a year.  Have you opened the box to retrieve any of these items?  Missed them?  Experienced even a brief tug of the brain-pan on their behalf?  No?  Without opening the box, take the entire thing to the thrift store drop-off and give yourself a pat on the back.  If you have made a mistake, you’ve reclaimed it already, so go ahead and donate!  

Box and banish provides a simple way to derail declutter distractions without undue anguish.  By building in a breathing space between getting decluttered items out of the kitchen and getting them to the yard sale, you’ve broken the sentimental attachment to the … to the … gosh, I can’t even remember! 

That, m’dear, is the point.

Focus on giving

For some, barriers to decluttering rise upon foundations of economics.  Phrases similar to “But I paid $____ for that rotary meat slicer!” or “But this teakettle might be worth something someday!” interpose themselves between you and the decision to declutter.

Both concerns are grounded in notions of value, so trump them by reaching for a higher one:  charity.  That teakettle may–or may not–have an eventual economic value, but to a family living on the edge, it can provide immediate comfort in the form of hot tea on a cold night.

Calm money-related declutter jitters by finding more direct form of giving than a yard sale or thrift store.  Call the local battered women’s shelter or facility for the homeless and ask if they accept household goods.  Kitchen basics are desperately needed by families in transition, who often move into housing from the street, with little more than the clothing on their backs.  Knowing that your surplus items will meet an immediate, true need can get you over the obsession with what they might be worth someday.

And you will help.  Consider this:  these families don’t have the luxury of possessions to declutter!

A final solution

Finally, there’s a never-fail, if drastic, solution to kitchen decluttering.  Some have this thrust upon them through a remodel or repair job, while others embrace it as a fell-swoop method to get the job done.

It’s simple.  Go to your kitchen.  Remove every blessed article from every drawer, cupboard and shelf.  Place these items in lidded boxes, and move them to a nearby storage area.

Each meal, retrieve from the boxes only those items necessary for that meal and return them to the kitchen.  Making mashed potatoes?  The peeler and the potato masher come out of the cold and into the kitchen for good.  It’s a good way to sift out surpluses of multiple items:  a family of four may find only six out of sixteen dinner plates are required in their new, lean kitchen.  

After several weeks, this method absolutely separates the sheep from the goats.  Items in active use are in the kitchen where they belong, and the “goats” are already boxed and ready to be moved out.

For would-be minimalists, this is the declutter method of choice.  For others, it’s like taking bitter cascara:  it’s drastic, but it works!