What's the Big Fuzz on Virtual Memory

[Benjie Solleza]

What's the advantages/disadvantages of inceasing/decreasing the virtual memory of a computer?? Is there such an ideal size of virtual memory needed by a computer to function efficiently?? Or managing virtual memory is basically dependent on your existing system.. My computer is Pentium 4 1.8Ghz (I guessed) with 256MB DDR RAM with Windows XP Professional installed on it...I've tried increasing/decreasing my virtual memory and I noticed no substantial changes were noticeable on the performance of my unit...except that when I need to do a movie using the Windows MovieMaker, I had to increase the size of my virtual memory to save my movie in the hard disk/CD...Can somebody enlighten me about virtual memory?? Thanks in advance...

[Cricket]

Virtual Memory in WinXP

If you really want to improve the performance of your WinXP computer you need to increase the physical RAM to at least 512MB. Playing around with the virtual memory won't do a thing for performance because virtual memory is the swap file on the hard drive and the hard drive is very slow compared to physical RAM.

Cricket

[jayb1234]

Agreed. Windows will run with 256 Mb, but when you add in all the other stuff that is running (firewall, antivirus, and anything else you have open), you will be swapping out memory to the hard disk a lot. An increase to 512 or higher should give you a noticable improvement.