i have seen a lot of posts on this subject what is the correct setting from min to max running i now have updated my memmory to 516ram can anyone help

The "rule" for XP is 1.5 times ram. So that would be a gig and a quarter. My opinion? You don't need nearly that much. I bet you will find a 500 meg pagefile just fine. Don't forget now your disk where vitual memory is put as a file is dog slow compared to physical ram. Here are some good guidelines: 1. leave the pagefile on the boot partition if only one disk 2. right size the pagefile with some to spare. You do this by monitoring the pagefile over time without rebooting and resizing to just a bit larger then max used. 3. set min and max the same. This is what prevents fragmentation. I have found no difference alone or with files concerning fragmentation because I set min and max the same. 4. if you have multiple disks place the pagefile on the least used fastest disk. 5. ignore the message about the crash dump file when moving the pagefile from boot partitiion because the dump is a waste of space and time [can't tell you how many hours I wasted on this]

thanks mines set at min 796 max 4086 for some know reason

The "rule" pretty much can be thrown out the window for anyone with 512MB or more RAM, it was written for back in the days when 256MB for RAM was considered high. Setting your page file to 700min and 700max should be just fine for anything you do unless your using memory intensive applications. For those with 1GB or RAM or more, you can practically discard the pagefile altogether, unless once again you are running some pretty heavy apps (for us photoshop and CAD freaks out there) Make sure if you move your pagefile to another drive to remove the old pagefile. Reboot, and then change your folder options to view system files, and then delete the old pagefile.sys file after rebooting, or you'll lose Gb of hard drive space where the file was before.

i have 768 mb ram no page file for over a year and have a very fast systen with no side affects set it to zero and enjoy your extra speed