> In this case, change those two radio buttons for Processor Scheduling
> and Memory Usage to their opposite values, and increase the minimum
> and maximum pagefile size to both be 2 times the amount of physical
> RAM in your system.

  Basing the size of the page file on the amount of installed RAM (different places 
recommend 1.5x or 2x, and maybe other nubers too) is a pure Rule of Thumb based on 
the assumption that the amount of installed RAM is adequate for the typicl applications 
load on the machine.  Which it may very well not be.

  Each application has, for a given set of data (for a word processing application, for 
instance, it tends to depend on the size of the document), an overall memory 
requirement, and a "working set" -- a subset of that memory requirement which includes 
at least 90% of the memory actively being referred to at the moment.  (in the word 
processing case, this would include the page you are currently editting, but not the 
whole book!)
  Virtual memory allows the application memory that isn't in the working set to live on 
disk so that actual RAM may be used by other running applications.  So "adequate 
installed RAM" means big enough to hold the working sets of all of the applications that 
you use at the same time.  If an application's working set doesn't all fit into RAM at 
once, attempts to use that application will spend much of their time dumping some part 
of the working set to disk and reading in another part of the working set, leaving very 
little time for actual application execution.  Most users don't consider the result usable...

  So:  the page file, the disk space allocated for virtual memory, needs to be big enough 
to accommodate the memory demands of the application mix (and not just their working 
sets)  1.5x, 2x and so forth are rough estimates of how this size might relate to the 
working sets of the applications (and the OS, of course).
  In today's environment of large applications and cheap hard drives, you can probably 
make the page file as large as Windows will let you, and not have to worry about it.  And 
set the minimum and maximum the same so the file doesn't constantly grow and shrink 
and fragment your disk allocations.
  And adding real RAM will probably help, too.

David Gillett

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