I hate to waste space just to praise this site, but i am anyway. After reading how to set virtual memory and calculating current RAM by 2.5 and ending up with over 1,000 mb of swap file, everything was sluggish. I took the advice of a user in here that said not to exceed 512 for virtual memory, and did so. the machine blazes, also the first time i put the swap file on D:, this time i put it on c:. Totally better than windows management. it really blazes. so if you have 512 RAM on a 98se system i highly recommend it. peace.

The 2.5 "rule" is very archaic and should not be used. With 512MBs of ram, you most likely don't use the swapfile anyway, so it is just as easy to let Windows handle it.

WhitPhil is absolutely right (as usual). He is the man. :-)

The lack of logic in setting VM to 2.5 x RAM (or any other figure), goes like this:- The more RAM you install the more VM you will need to set. Hmmm - more like the other way round I'd say. Derek

Not sure whether this changed with SE, but I would suggest adding this line to the 386Enh section of your C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI file: ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 Then, as has been noted, with 512 Meg of RAM, there shouldn't be any need (or very little) for the swapfile. Windows 98, by default (without the aforementioned tweak), throws a bunch of data into the swapfile upon boot (for speed, believe it or not, but the design was back when the average Windows 98 system had 32 Meg of RAM or less). The 2 or 2.5x physical RAM made some sense back when it was unusual to have more than 64 Meg of RAM. I would say that, in your case (512 Meg RAM), 128 Meg is more than plenty for a swapfile, assuming you'd like to set it to not let Windows handle it. Good luck.

C_Legend & KmIeLL I can confirm that the Conservative Swap file tweak does work in W98SE (I've checked that it actually does do something). As for the little bit of swap file you see then WhitPhil explained this admirably in post #14 here: 151552 There's some other stuff worth reading on that post too. Derek