How much virtual memory?

[Wakeboarder141]

When I let windows manage my virtual memory I occasionally get errors saying that virtual memory is too low. What is a good setting to manually set it to? Is it better for my boot drive or my 2nd hard drive or both to have the page file on it? Should you adjust your virtual memory when you add more ram? Thanks.

Aaron

A7n8x deluxe
Athlon XP 2200+
1x256mb Kingston Ram
Windows XP Pro
2x120gb WD Caviar 8mb

[vass0922]

I usually set my pagefile min = RAM, and max = 2x RAM

I'd also suggest getting more RAM, 256 is OK but believe me XP won't mind a bit if you put more in!

You can put your pagefile on the 2nd HD so it won't use up performance from your OS writing to the main HD.

[rastorize]

What are your chances of upgrading to 512 MB of ram? 256 is almost too little for XP...therefore it needs to use your harddrive as virtual memory when the real stuff runs out.

Generally you'd want your swap file on another partition other than the boot drive...some say to even create a partition specifically for it...making the swap file partition about two times the size of the amount of RAM you have. For example, if you have 256 MB of RAM, make the swap file partition 512 MB.


Here is an excellent article on optimizing the Windows swap file:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/w...371764,00.html


Hope this helps!

[Wakeboarder141]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am going to make a small partition off of my 2nd drive and put the paging file on it. Do I need a lot of extra room or just enough to fit the pagefile on it? I did have 512mb of ram in here but I fried one of them when my old PSU and mobo died. It will eventually get some more.

[George VII]

I would make the partition about 1 gig. A larger page file never hurts anything!

[rastorize]

I 2nd that...