Page File question

[xQuiKsiLveR]

System specs are in the sig. In looking at the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager (A.K.A. CTRL+ALT+DEL) I noticed something that I thought was weird. There is an area for Physical Memory and this is what is reads:

Physical Memory (K)
Total 523744
Available 323920
System Cache 184816

Now, the total memory seems right, because I have 512 MB of RAM, and it says that about 300 MB of RAM is free. However in the Page File Usage section, it says I am using 163 MB of my Page File!

My question is this: Why would Windows start using my Page File if the regular memory wasn't used up yet? Or am I totally confused?

Thanks in advance for clearing this up for me.

 

[Basie]

Win2k and WinXP do a better job of managing the swap file. If you have that much Ram you may want to
change the size of the page file to 100MB for both Min and Max. You can always increase it if thats not
enough. I have 384MB of ram and my page file was 115mb.