Virtual memory, why is it beeing used while i still have free memory?

[itisi]

my current setting of virtual memory is 745mb which is the default for 500mb i have.

i have a little program that shows memory and virtual memory, i see while in windows about 256 is beeing used in my memory stick and 256 in virtual.

why is the slow virtual memory working before i ran out of good and fast memory stick?

 

[Peddant]

" XP REQUIRES "backing storage" for EVERYTHING it keeps in RAM.
Virtual Memory is always in use.All processess gets virtual memory addresses
(a Virtual Address Space) no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer."

"Memory allocation in is a two-step process--virtual memory addresses are reserved first, and committed second...The reservation process is simply a way NT tells the Memory Manager to reserve a block of virtual memory pages to satisfy other memory requests by the process...There are many cases in which an application will want to reserve a large block of its address space for a particular purpose (keeping data in a contiguous block makes the data easy to manage) but might not want to use all of the space."

In other words,that virtual memory to which you refer,is only allocated memory,not necessarily
paged memory.

The thing you really want to know,is the actual pagefile usage.Use this programHERE

Further reading HERE and HERE