windows xp virtual memory / paging file

Hi folks!

I'm having a doubt about windows memory management.
By default windows uses the phisical memory or the page file?
I noted that windows uses paging file even the phisical memmory isn't full.
Then when I set the pagefile to zero. (To force windows to use phisical memmory first. It seems to work but when I using a program that need too much memmory and the phisical memory is full windows start the paging file. The fact is when that happens the program I was running crashes. I tried that with 3 different programs.

Could someone help me?

thanks in advance

Hello, aze!

Allow me to point you in a direction that a member here turned me onto yesterday. Maybe your questions will be answered here (http://www.theeldergeek.com/paging_file.htm)

Hope that helps you some, and good luck!!

Hi there,

There is a memory tweak guide in techspot also:

http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/memory-winxp/index.shtml

It has also a way to make the system use more physical memory for the system cache.

Just backup the important files as messing up with tweaks will eventually make you do a mistake... (hopefully not).

There's nothing wrong with tweaks and hacks. Yes, eventually you will make a mistake, but that's true of anything. At the end of the day, the best lessons are the ones we learn from experience. You don't learn if you never do it.

If you decide to use tweaks and hacks, or if you acctually work the out/develope them yourself, a very good idea is to image your windows partition with a utility that will boot from cd to restore your OS if it all goes wrong. Not only is this quicker than re-installing, but it means that you can keep all your settings etc.

A good proc to use is TweakUI. This has an option to force windows to use physical memory first, before using the pagefile.

Also, if you have two hard drives, it can often be a good idea to set up virtual memory on both drives. Hard drives are a very slow form of memory, and with a paging file on each drive, the process of using virtual memory is sped up, as windows can read from one file and write to the other at the same time.