I ran a program called SequoiaView which gives a graphical indication of the contents of the HDD It showed the following: 1.5Gb of Program files 2.5Gb of music etc.in My Documents 2.5 Gb of files to do with the OS 2.0 Gb of Pagefile.sys Googling "Pagefile", I found suggestions that it should be 1.5 times the RAM (I have 4Gb). The advice seemed to relate to much smaller amounts of RAM Does that "Rule of Thumb" apply when there is lots of RAM? Tomg

no. let windows handle it Goin' Fishin' (Some day)

The 1.5 times RAM idea was something that grew up with Windows 98. Windows 98 was a hybrid system of both 16 bit and 32 bit software using both real mode and protected mode CPU operations. This tended to make memory management problematic. Windows XP is a 32 bit system that only uses projected mode operations so memory management is considerably easier and a lot more efficient. Set the page file to let Windows handle it automatically. There should be no need to start manipulating it yourself unless you have some unusual requirements and then you need to know exactly how the page file works and what it does. Stuart

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... HOWTO: Set Performance Options in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to Configure Paging Files for Optimization and Recovery in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to Clear the Windows Paging File at Shutdown http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How To Move the Paging File in Windows XP