Kyle said:
I was wondering if there was some kind of setting I
needed to change to tell Windows XP Pro to use up all the
RAM capacity before beginning to use Virtual Memory. I
know there was such a setting in Win98, but I couldn't
find one in XP. Thanks.
Windows XP will always repeat always use RAM in preference to virtual
memory for actual memory content. Period.
However it will always use virtual memory for the *unused* portions of
memory allocation requests.
Windows must, by definition, identify memory space in RAM or the page
file for all of the memory allocation requests that are issued by
Windows components and application programs.
So if an application requests a total memory allocation of 10
megabytes, but only actually uses 6 megabytes of this then Windows
will only allocate 6 megabytes of RAM for the portion that is actually
being used and will map the other 4 megabytes to locations in the page
file.
Note that because the 4 megabytes is unused there is no actual disk
activity needed for this, just entries in the internal memory mapping
tables maintained by the CPU.
There is no easy way included with Windows XP that will report on
actual usage of the page file - that is where actual memory pages have
been relocated from physical RAM to the page file so as to allow that
RAM to be used for other, currently more important tasks. A free
utility that does report this value can be downloaded from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/
Note that if this utility reports a substantial amount of actual page
file usage (e.g. 50 mb or more) on a regular basis then that is an
indication that more RAM is likely to have a beneficial effect on
overall performance.
Hope this explains the situation.
Good luck
Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
