620mb Ram but still a huge pagefile?

[kisk]

I just upgraded my ram from 128mb to 620mb, and I figured, "Ok, the paging file shouldn't be used all that much now."

After installing the new 512mb stick, I still see that I'm using 150-320mb of the page file, even when I have close to 300mb of free ram. Why is this? I thought the pagefile was used only when the phisical memory was running low... Is there a way to fix this? I'm running WinXP Pro.

Thanks

[morriswindgate]

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Pagefile

http://www.computerbits.com/archive/.../bair0102.html

[Tuf]

XP will use the paging file for some operations even if shut it off. Really after all the years of playing with paging file sizes I have come to the conclusion with XP that it really is better to let Windows manage it.

Other than putting it on it's own partition on another drive I don't think there's alot you can do to make it work better. The onservativeSwapFileUsage tweak that has been going around the internet for some time does seem to help slower systems a little. There are a lot of experts that say it doesn't apply to XP at all but I use it on all of my systems. I can tell much difference on my faster computers but I can on my slower IDE ones(notebooks).

[reboot]

It's not the size of the pagefile you're concerned about, it's how much it gets used.
Just adding RAM won't change the pagefile size, and depending on what software you run, it could use the pagefile, even if there's plenty of RAM left (shoddy software will do this).
Even editing a picture in Paintshop. If you make 50 changes, most of them will go into the swap, not RAM, leaving RAM free for the actual running of the program. This is by design, which is why it's not good to totally turn off the swap/page file.
Even if the page file gets used to half it's total size, how often is it referenced? If it's only read from once or twice in a day, then obviously adding all that RAM helped. Before you added the RAM, it would be written/read about once every few seconds...clear as mud?