I'm getting cross-eyed reading all the posts from 1/16 of ram to 2.5 or 3x your ram or 300/300 max/min.or 1000/1000 or min =(small) and NO Max?? seems like every poster has his/her own ideas about it..I have had a few probs running Photoshop and some cad pgms but nothing serious with 512M ram.. I went back to "Let Windows look after it"... but I agree with RenMan...No Cacheman.MemPro..etc they just use up resources etc.. now having second thoughts about different settings.any thoughts??

I use my PC for engineering applications and CADs and academic programs. Have used 1000 MIN and MAX on P3 @ 1G (with 100 G HD, 512 MB RAM) for a while now with no problems. Cacheman is a good program for what it does, and the resources it uses are no more than any other program which does the same things. Its output is of value to those who want to optimize their system and closely observe the processes. I say keep exploring, as each PC and user demands are different. You will find may different opinions on this, perhaps more than one of them corrrect.

I like your answer EC! Too many others are too adamant about doing something only one way. My vcache settings helped me to recover more of my resources more of the time. Since they're easy enough to change, why not do as EC says, and experiment? Although some say ConservativeSwapFileUseage=1 is for 95/98 and not WinMe, I use it. As I understand it, it essentiall tells Windows "dont even think of using the swap file until you use all your memory first." The theory of a fixed swap file (which may not work out in practice) is (a) your computer doesn't have to "work" to dynamically resize it, and (b) more important, it will never be fragemented, which is not necessarily true of a non-fixed (let Windows manage it, or no max setting). Also (c) you can put the swapfile on the fastest part of the disk (with Norton's or McAfee's defragmenters); a dynamically (re)sized swap file goes wherever there's room. For the most thorough discussion on swap files you can imagine, go here. These are settings I added to [386Enh]: ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 PageBuffers=32 DMABufferSize=64 MinSPs=8 LocalLoadHigh=1 MinTimeSlice=40 PerVMFiles=70 Try 'em. You might like 'em. Or not. I think it's fun to tweak to see how much we can get out of a system. But there is a law of diminishing returns. Once you get your system to run well with few or no problems, stop tweaking and use and enjoy your computer. ============================================ More important than any belief a person holds is the way s/he holds it. (Sidney Hook)