If I have 1gig+ of Ram on XP pro, should i disable VM?

[Booter]

Windows XP's memory management is so advanced and so perfect that you do NOT need to mess with it.

I agree, but as a Power users i just can't resist tweaking my system (and i do see better performance tweaking it) and as long as i don't get any problems, it dosen't bother me.

Trust me, I learned that the hard way.

Did you run XP with I GB ram? And what happened exactly?

 

[lssanjose]

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=eb9ba971928f1312e3255bba74e4b368&threadid=10062

 

[NokiaDude]

Well with 1Gb of RAM Windows knows that is has alot of RAM and will try and not page everything that is idle to the page file if it can help it.

 

[Mallow]

No, it does serve a purpose if you happen to have a problem that over loads and gets a stack error. If you only have your system RAM your computer will lock up quickly, however, if you have your VM you might be able to save it!

 

[Arcanedeath]

Personaly I have 1Gig of ram w/ XP pro and I disabled the page file and haven't had issues for over a year + I normaly run 24/7 w/ the only reboots due to power outages or software updates. I also noticed a small improvment over having even an optimised swap file, NT os's will use VM even if you have enough physical ram because of the way they are written and the only way to prevent that is to disable the swap file, If it does turn out you need a swap file, windows will tell you and you can always add it again later, for ex. when I open large pictures in photo shop, I've had to re-enable the page file because it won't fit in physical ram, but other than for photo shop I haven't needed or wanted a swap file. and my system feels snappeir w/out a swap file IMHO. Hope this helps....

 

[lssanjose]

well you can do that all you want. YOu're certainly not eliminating paging though . Virtual memory is still being used in the form of your exe's, dlls, and your other files

 

[Derango]

The reason windows 2k/XP looks like its using a lot of page file space when you have lots of memory is that it reserves enough memory in the page file to swap a program out (even if it doesn't need to swap it to disk) just in case it ever needs to free up some ram. If you have enough ram, tto run your programs, its not actually touching the swap file for storage at all.