Would setting my swap-file smaller force my computer to rely more on RAM? In theory, the RAM is faster and preferable. I have a gigabyte of RAM. Better yet, could I disable my swap-file altogether? Would doing this yield faster speeds? The computer is mainly used for hi-res Photoshop files and multi-track audio recording, which require the computer to be running smoothly. No hiccups. Thanks for your expertise. John

Well if its performance you want then i find it be better than page file, since that uses hdd activity and my hdd's are busy enough! You can disable your page file buy (right click) My Computer>Properties>Advanced>Performance>Advanced>Change (in vertual memory section) then click 'No Page File' then Set, then reset your pc for the changes to take effect. I suppose this gives you a little better performance but does use excess memory, photoshop will come up with a message going on about the implications of no page file, a gig should be enough, any lower is a no-no.

Your page file is only used when you don't have enough memory available to service everything that's running. Disabling or limiting the page file will only cause problems. Limiting the number of programs that you have running is the best way to limit the use of the page file. You probably have some programs running all the time that could be started only when needed.

Set up a small page file on the C: drive and then make a larger page file on another drive. Some programs will look for a page file reguardless of what your configuration is. A gig of ram is good but for what you're doing a page file is required. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...

I would disagree with both ham30 and setishock. A little vocabulary checkup: OS uses a page file, programs, if designed to, use a swap file. I have run for considerable time on no page file with 786megs of ram. Only issue I have ever run into is coping large amounts of text from internet web pages to XP Office's Word. I get not enough memory close some apps message. I can live with that for the gain in performance and stability. It simply is not true that without a pagefile "will only cause problems" though for most folks I would recommend a 50meg pagefile if you have plenty of ram. If you do have a second drive [not drive letter ie same drive but another partition] you can optimize your pagefile by placing it on the other drive removing all paging from c:. This eliminates disk io contention between pagefile ops and system ops. No reason to leave any pagefile on c: since you will never use a disk dump for troubleshooting [unless you want to send it to MS at $245 per incident - I would rebuild from scratch before I did that!]

Wanderer, isn't " I get not enough memory close some apps message." a problem? Windows only uses the Page File when he has no other choice. He does not willy nilly decide "Gee, I guess I'll start using the page file now instead of RAM". You obviously have enough RAM to run your programs without resorting to the page file. That does not mean everyone else is in that position.

How virtual memory works