Virtual Memory?

[cosmos100]

Hey guys,

As the title may suggest I'm a little curious about virtual memory.

I know what it does basically expanding your RAM into your HDD (if I'm wrong sorry).

I know how to access it ect ect. Just wondering... are there any general rules of thumb when expanding it? Can you go too far with it? Basically this is due to work, I get error codes about it now and again and general jab away at it and it works (I know Im terrible but I wasn't given the worlds best training)

for instance mine is -

Space available - 205647 MB

Intial siza - 1536 MB
Max size - 3072 MB

I think my virtual memory is fine, just could do with making more sence of it all.

Cheers guys

 

[fastco]

You can't beat good old Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Also if you add more system memory those error messages will go away.

 

[cosmos100]

I really need to use wiki more often...

 

[pdyckman@comcas]

Windows 'Help and Support' is a good source for answers to many O.S. questions. It's amazing how often it is overlooked. It says your "V.M." should be 1.5 times the size of your ram,. In my case that would be 6 Gigs. I only run 1500 mb's.

 

[SNGX1275]

I think that 1.5x your physical RAM is a good guideline up until about the 1GB mark of physical RAM. After that you can be pretty safe setting it to something lower.

On my machines I always fix the minimum and maximum size, this prevents a growing and shrinking file on your hard drive, which can reduce the rate of fragmentation.

 

[Gavin_Capacitor]

I had an idea about virtual memory (kinda stolen from the Vista thing).
Would it be beneficial to buy, say a 2GB flash drive and set XP to use that for virtual memory (no other virtual memory set, use the whole 2GB flash drive). It would be alot faster than switching out to the HDD and you HDD would run alot faster since it wouldn't have to seek for the memory.