I recently got a new hard drive and 512meg of ram (making a total of 1 gig). I decided to reformat my main hard drive and reinstall winXP pro.

After I reinstalled, I started putting my old programs on and after a couple hours, suddenly my computer would hang up on boot up and during log on "loading your settings". I was getting a paging file error and checked under the performance properties in My Computer and sure enough, I had no paging file. The problem was that it wouldn't even let me set it. I would click custom and put in values and click set but the paging file size would stay zero. I thought I ruined something so I decided to reformat and reinstall windows again. Once again, after a few resets and adding programs, the same problem happened again. Unfortunately I am not sure which program I put on last before it happened.

Is there any reason I would not be able to set the paging file size?
I followed instructions on a microsoft support site, booting in safe mode, setting security settings for the drive so that my account has NTFS control but I am the admin account, so it was already set.

Please help,

David

EDIT - I am running SP1 as well.

This one's got me baffled. Can you list out the programs you installed?

I'd try running System Restore, restore to the first restore point, which should be right when you finished installing Windows, to see if you could have set Virtual Memory then. If so, then re-install each piece of software, and reboot and check Virtual Memory settings after each install, until you (hopefully) figure out what did it to you.

Good luck on this baffling issue.

Duncan,

I followed your advice to use to use system restore and what -seems- to have done it was the install of a direct-x plugin called antares autotune that I use with cool edit pro. I don't know WHY this would happen, but it did. The only thing I haven't tried is installing it on the new hard drive instead of the system hard drive, but I don't feel like taking the risk right now. I'll see if I can create my own system restore points and if I can then I'll try it some time.

Thanks for your help.

A pleasure, glad to have helped you get sorted out. Take care.