Our company is now purchasing workstations with 4GB of RAM. With this much physical memory, and windows limitation of mapping only 4 GB of ram, should I even have a swapfile/pagefile? Or is it completely unnessary?

I have a fairly new Dell Dimension 8400 and the following is from the manual: Quote Addressing Memory With 4-GB Configurations Your computer supports a maximum of 4 GB of memory when you use four 1-GB DIMMs. Current operating systems, such as Microsoft® Windows® XP, can only use a maximum of 4 GB of address space; however, the amount of memory available to the operating system is less than 4 GB. Certain components within the computer require address space in the 4-GB range. Any address space reserved for these components cannot be used by computer memory. End of quote I can not state that the above information is unique to Dell computers or if it applies to all computers running WinXP. Regarding the pagefile...You need to have one as some applications require it. You certainly don't need a 4-6GB swapfile but 384-768MB ought to be ample. Regards, Bryan

What you want to start an extremely long thread/arguement?? :-) This subject will do it. Here is my experience. Watch for other to contribute. I have run XP with 786meg of ram and no pagefile. Only problem I ran into was copying and pasting with Office XP. The system runs better without a pagefile then when it has one from my experience. Where the gotcha is concerns applications. You may find some of your standard apps don't run correctly or you experience things like the copy and paste issue I ran into. You certainly could run with a 100meg pagefile and be just fine.

I too don't run with a pagefile, preferring to use physical ram. It's much faster. Then again I haven't found the probs wanderer has mentioned either. Having said that, there are some programs I use that do require a pagefile, when that occurs it's just a matter of activating the pagefile. Hard lessons learnt are not easily forgotten.

With that much RAM you shouldn't use a pagefile. As a test, disable all pagefiles, run all the applications that you might use and check task manager (alt-ctrl-del) to see how much physical memory you have left. Most likely, you will still have at least a gig of memory left.