Since I got my laptop, I have gone from 1 gig to 2 gigs of RAM - specifically, Mushkin DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel
http://www.newegg.com/product/prod [...] 6820146440

We all know that RAM is much faster than paging data to the hard drive for virtual memory, but would it work better to completely turn off the page file? I know some program require it, but what would be the lowest possible setting to use that wouldn't be detrimental? I don't want to have the standard 3 gigabyte (recommended 1.5x amount of ram), and right now I have a 512 meg file. I turned it off completely once, and my computer *seemed* to run slower, it may or may not have.

It's simply impossible to tell Windows not to use the pagefile even if you have 1GB of free RAM, because Windows sucks!
I have 2GB of RAM and even with 1.5GB of free RAM and setting all undocumented registry settings that affect pagefile usage, it still allocates at least 300MB... it's not *nix :-)

If you are absolutely sure you don't need swap space you can manually set the minimum and maximum values both to 0MB under Control Panel/System/Advanced/Settings (the first of the three buttons)/Advanced/Change (bottom of the page).

But if for some reason you have programs that occasionally require big amounts of memory for buffering you can get an OutOfMemory.

Windows pages things for good reasons, not everything has to sit in RAM. So does other Operating Systems. Even on Linux its not recommended to turn off swap.
Some of the stuff that the system rarely uses is paged. And also, open up task manager and go see what is using up swap.
View > Select Columns > and Check 'Virtual Memory Size'

Heres what mine looks like on my 512 machine


And keep in mind just because it says Commit Charge is XXXM doesnt mean that its being all used up, it just means that that much has been allocated to programs.

Did you see the review for IE7 Beta? When you minimize it, it pages much of its data in memory until you unminimize it.

Disable executive paging. It's a simple tweak that can improve your performance. Leave the Page file intact though. Disabling it will just give you more headaches than benefits.

Are you referring to changing the setting from Programs to System Cache?
Thats not even a tweak.

No, it's a registry key change. I use it since years, but it give absolutely no difference in performance and the amount of free RAM increases by 1-3%.

Well it's been 3 months now w/out a pagefile. I play HL2DM, Prey, Oblivion and Battlefield 2. My machine works perfectly, although I have to add my pagefile when I want to use adobe photoshop(stupid monkey), but I can use adobe premier 6 w/o pagefile. 2 gig of ram btw

The IE7 beta I used was a joke - a pathetic attempt by MS to catch up with Firefox. And Firefox let's go of system memory too when you minimize it, although it is not perfect. IE7 beta refreshed it's window every time I opened a tab or un-minimized it, which drove me up a frickin wall because I can't stand it changing it's place in the taskbar. Anyways this isn't a Firefox/IE rant or bash, so I'll drop this now lol.

The point is, I have 2 gigs of RAM and think it is kind of retarded to use the page file when I have 2 gigs of RAM. Ideally it would only use the RAM until there was none available, and performance should increase with that too. I might some day use 2 gigs of RAM at one time (for what, I have no clue. Encoding/decoding/photoshop/gaming/autocad? I don't check how much memory each thing uses), but I don't really need a page file until I hit that day.

No, changing it from the System Properties control panel does the samething as the 'registry hack'

I've never seen that happen and I have the latest stable version of Firefox. Is that a feature in 2.0 beta?
Firefox is a total RAM hog (its used 150MB of RAM and allocated some 100MB of swap) and probably has more mem leaks than IE.

It was in Tom's review of IE7 Beta, someone told them and they showed what you had to change in the config file. I have enough RAM I left it off though since it seems to slow things down slightly (I guess it has to transfer to/from the hard drive maybe? I dunno).

Without VM, you are going to see a lot of memory errors (windows sucks), and with most people having a big hard drive, why would you care about VM taking up space?

Pretty much every OS needs virtual mem. Even Linux and Mac OS X. You should see how much Macs swap. Go to a Mac run 10 and open up terminal and type 'top'

I have 2GB of RAM and no page file, works fine with no errors at all... And makes WoW have zero lag

As a programmer that is intimately familiar with Operating System Memory Management I can tell you that running Windows (or any other OS that I know of, including all variants of unix) is a BAD idea.

I am unable to explain in simple terms why. There are simply too many aspects that come into play. If you'd like to know exactly why, read the following:

Windows Internals
Mark Russinovich and Dave Solomon

and the Intel processor manuals (3 volumes).

Happy reading!