Do I Have Enough RAM? Is My Swap File Too Big?

[NeilPeart]

Hey guys (and girls =),
I just installed 512MB RAM in my system, and I have noticed an increase in system performance (mainly when multi-tasking and working in Photoshop). However, Windows still insists on using my swap file. I understand that Windows always needs SOME swap file, but I wonder if I made it too large. SiSoft Sandra suggests making the swap file 2.5x the memory; I think a 1,280MB swap file is overkill, so I left it at 640MB (256 x 2.5), but that may still be too much. What is the optimal swap file size for a system with 512MB RAM? Is a larger swap file always advantageous? Below are my system specs. Thanks for any input.

Asus A7M266 (AMD 760)
AMD Thunderbird "C" 1.33GHz
512MB Crucial DDR (1 DIMM)
Paging File is 640MB (256 x 2.5) fixed on non-OS drive.

Windows XP Pro

29 Processes

Commit Charge: 158MB/1122MB

Programs Currently Running:

Norton Anti-Virus 2002
Zone Alarm 3
Ad-Aware Watcher 4
AIM 4.8
MS Messenger 4.7
MS Outlook Express 6
Winamp 2.79
5x IE 6
Task Manager
Notepad

Physical Memory:

Total - 523,744
Avail - 311,292
Sys Cache - 276,576

Kernel Memory:

Total - 48,300
Paged - 28,868
Nonpaged - 19,432

 

[bignick]

This registry setting works in nt4 and win2k to reduce the amount of paging ram contents to disk. should work in XP.

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Edit the value: DisablePagingExecutive - change to "1"
Data type is REG_DWORD


Then just set you page file to ram + video card ram - for me it's 512+32=548

also turn off the indexing service if it's on. if you use NTFS - which you should in XP pro - disable the 8dot3 name creation (only needed by 16bit programs, and a few 32bit programs) and disable the last access update attribute on files/folders. look at www.regedit.com for more info.