Clear the page file contents for added security

Page file is a file that is used by windows operating system as extra ram for its operations. What happens when you open a document is MS Word is that the documents gets loaded to your RAM. Now a user works on many files in windows. Hence to save RAM what the operating system does is that it saves the contents of the RAM into page file. Now the page file can be opened and the documents on which we were working can be extracted from it. In case we are working on any confidential documents then this page file poses a threat to the document’s confidentiality.

In such conditions it is better to delete the contents of the page file when we shut down the computer after our work is over. This feature is been made available by Microsoft but they haven’t enabled it as default. Hence we need to enable this feature manually.

Follow the given steps to clear your page file :

Open Start >> Run function.

Type in regedit and press enter.

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ Current Control Set \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \

Double click on “Clear page file at shutdown” and change the value to one(1).

Now the function is enabled. But you need to restart your computer in order for it to start working.

Note that enabling the clear page file function slows down (takes time) your PC while shutting down. But then it is nothing compared to the security that we achieve.