Need a little more memory space for your Windows drive? Save your money for now and free up some space by adding pagefiles with this registry hack.

If you desperately need more memory space for your Windows, you can buy more RAM—or add pagefiles to your existing drive with this registry hack. First, make directories for the number of pagefiles you want. Then, do this:

1. Launch your favorite registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
   (Note: There are word spaces in the last two entries.)
2. Replace the value of the PagingFiles key with the following format:
   X:\<directory>\pagefile.sys 2048 4096

   And each subsequent one like so:
   X:\<directory>\pagefile.sys 0 4000

3. Close your editor and reboot.

You need to have one directory for every pagefile you want to add, and you can make the active and maximum values anything you want as long as they’re between zero and 4096. If you leave any subsequent active values at zero, the server will not allocate any of the now-available space until needed.

If you do choose to do this, be aware that things will slow down quickly when those pagefiles start filling up. Nothing beats real RAM, so get some of that before going this route. If that’s not possible, my suggestion is to cycle your servers(s) once a day and set the ClearPageFileAtShutdown key to 1 (this is the equivalent of turning it on). If you have more than one server, stagger the cycle so that only one is off at a time.

Note: Please remember that editing your registry can be risky, so always have a verified backup before you begin.