Any ramifications to disabling ClearPageFile

I am runing a Dell XPS 15z with a quad core I7, 8gb ram, 7200rpm hdd, windows 7 ultimate. My laptop was taking around 3 minutes to shut down, which seemed far too high to me. I did a bit of investigation, and it seemed that the ClearPageFile reg entry was set to 1, meaning that upon shutdown my pagefile.sys was being cleared before actually shutting the machine down. When I disable this setting, my laptop shuts down in about 20 seconds - clearly a big gain. My question is, are there any side effects of having this turned off (other than the security risk of the HDD being stolen, and still having any important info that was in the RAM up for grabs)?

Ben

Posted 2012-07-09T08:06:29.673

Reputation: 255

not much besides a little lowered security level.. – tumchaaditya – 2012-07-09T09:21:18.880

Answers

You can safely turn this off. It will not affect our system adversely. This is set to 0 by default.

arundevma

Posted 2012-07-09T08:06:29.673

Reputation: 1 404

1[citation needed] – Sathyajith Bhat – 2012-07-09T09:00:32.093

I haven't set the value to 1, so that was the default state in my instance. Perhaps it's to do with the version of Windows - Ultimate being the business end of things may need the added security of wiping the page file, so the default is 1? – Ben – 2012-07-09T09:39:25.300

May be it was set by some softwares you installed. In my case it is set to 0 by default. – arundevma – 2012-07-09T15:02:04.977