No matter how much I increase the RAM on my friend's machine the swap file always remains between 40-50MB. That's how big it is when the machine boots just to a desktop. I can't imagine what coould be choking up the swap file like this. He's running ME with 320MB of RAM (after an upgrade which didn't affect the size of the swap file) in a Dell Dimension L800R. The swap file is windows managed, 0 minimum, total free hard drive space set for maximum. I can find no programs running in the background thart should put this much burden on the swap file, just the minimum. Anybody have any ideas as to why the swap file is so big? On my Win98 machine with tons of software on it and only 192MB of RAM there's only around 10MB on the swap file at anty given time unless I have a lot of stuff open.

I'm using cacheman to get this reading of 40-60MB paging file usage with nothing opened except the OS and some minor startup programs and a surplus of RAM. I just noticed that with Windows System Monitor there are two settings, Swap File Size (which agrees with Cacheman) but then there is another called Swap File In Use and that value is zero. How would Swap File in Use with System Monitor be different from Cacheman's Usage reading? If the swap file is say 50MB does that mean those 50 MBs are "in use"? or is the size of the swapfile just growing so it can accomodate the demand if it arises and is NOT really being used? Can't figure this out.

Hello Chris, From your first post, pls. check your friend's computer for a third party memory manager that is transferring the memory allocation, from the tasks that are running, to the virtual memory or swap file instead to the RAM. If this is happening, the RAM is free but the swap file usage is very large like what you said. From your second post, based on your computer, the Swap File in Use is zero because maybe the memory usage for the tsaks currently running are allocated to the RAM but the your swap file allocation is still free because the Swap File in Use is still Zero . Swap File in Use plus the Swappable Memory option equals the Swap File Size equivalent to the Cacheman's swap file readings. Hope this helps..

Thanks, godz, for the reply. I'm certain there's no 3rd party program running like that (except for cacheman ;) but I was careful to disable any memory management function because I just want it to monitor memory usage). What confuses me about Cacheman vs. System Monitor is that Cacheman has the swap file USAGE as ~50MB where System Monitor has that for SIZE and has ZERO swap file in use. If I check the size of the swap file WIN386.swp it is around 50MB (how unusual is that with just a desktop?). If I open several programs it grows somewhat, then when I close them it remains larger than before. I'm wondering if it's growing to accomodate a potential demand but isn't actually being used, the RAM is. I don't hear thrashing from the hard drive though the LED comes on time to time switching between apps. I can force windows to use the RAM to its fullest by enabling Conservative Swap File Use in Cacheman, but I'd like to figure out why it's so big in the first place, or maybe this is normal, I don't know. Probably I'm misunderstanding something here.

Turn the swap file off, then defrag, then turn the swap back on...!!!