Hey. I have a 256MB RAM, and was told in one of the forum's here that if I upgraded to 512MB, I should see a substancial increase in my comp's performance. I was wondering, instead of buying more memory, would my computer get faster if I just turned the page file right up to like, 1 or 2GB?? (I have a 40GB HDD, and am only using 10GB of it, so it is no problem to turn up the page file.) But I wanted to know whether or not this would have the same effect as buying more memory. Thanks in advance.

Buying Memory is more effective than increasing the page file... By increasing the page file, it would actually slow down the computer a bit. Page file is a backup when Memory is used up. Page file comes from the harddrive and is slower than actual memory. Using more page file would also fragment your drive so ud need to defragment every few days.

Buy the memory. It will give you better long term performance that changing the page file. There is a definate advantage going from 256M to 512M but little or no gain going above 512M. Very few home users like us ever get to use the full 512M of memory so any further increase is useless. A check of your memory usage after upgrade will probably show 320M to 380M max used.