The first time you load any program from disk you will have 100% page faults (as the program isn't in RAM yet and must be loaded). Then if the page is paged out of RAM back to disk, you'll get another page fault when the CPU requires that page to be retrieved again.

This had page faults, now again it has page faults. It is obviously a fault increases every second or faster looking at task manager - explorer.

So i installed all the same software to another pc that had no page faults. Not doing it analitical to find the culprit. Just to see if the error would occur again.

Results = page faults same as pc above.

It has to be software or driver related.

Although i had also loaded up microsoft updates from march_06 cd.

I thought also that page faults are errors so when i looked into this i was almoust shittin` my pants :)

[img]http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/7263/untitledos4.jpg[/img]

Now i'm ok knowing what it is!

Dont Worry!! Turn that column off ur task manager, its a stupid thing to call it a fault, its not. check this link out for fat details if I still havent convinced u not 2 waste ne more time on this ;)

So I said to myself "what's happening EVERY second?"

The answer is: Task Manager is updating it's info every second. Want to test my theory? Just open Task Manager, go to the processes tab and verify that explorer.exe is just spewing out the PFs (you may have to first enable the column from View-->Select Columns-->Page Faults), then go to the View menu, select Update Speed, and then select Paused. In my case these pesky PFs stopped immediately, and of course started again when I reset the update speed to normal.

I'm satisfied ;) comments?

Thats all no error at all.

A 'page fault' is just a term invented years ago by somebody who invented 'virtual memory' or in plain words: a swap-file on a harddisk to store memory if you don't have enough of it.

It's not an error, it's just an indicator of how many times the operating system needs to load a block of 'virtual' memory from the harddisk back into the pc's RAM.

If you add more memory, you will lower the chance that memory has to be stored on the harddisk. But windows likes ram a lot... it tries to keep often-used memory blocks into your RAM while it saves less-used memory blocks to the swap-file so it can store more-often used blocks into RAM again.

Periodically, my page faults / sec for explorer.exe hit and exceed 2 thousand!!! which of course consumes all avail CPU cycles in priv mode to service the race. My only correction available is to kill explorer.exe in the task manager and restart it (so that I'll have my desktop gui back). Then I'm OK for a day or two, until the condition recurs. This, in my case, has absolutely nothing to do with actual available memory.

Microsoft says they corrected it in XP SP1, but in my case, there is no correction there.

One of my sytems has more than enough ram: 512...plenty when no big tasks are running heh. And the page faulting in explorer is occuring when the bloody things sit idle with very few processes. I see the other processes requiring a hard drive hit fairly often (if that's truly what they are.) Understandable - but explorer.exe doing it almost twice a second = funky: a fast update or something that isn't being handled correctly by explorer, or the os...or whatever. Looking at it now, it's up above 110,000 while the other 13 processes are 6500 or way below.

Interesting this is occuring on both xp and 2k systems...what chipsets is this noticed in (Intel, AMD?) Mine are both AMD: KT-133 & nForce2. It's probably not memory related on the amd side (as far as our systems are concerned; unless it happens to be an inherent problem with all current AMD chipsets.)