Managing Your Virtual Memory

When your physical RAM fills up, it desperately needs another kind of temporary storage to be able to run your applications.  Therefore, it creates a virtual memory right on your hard disk to satisfy that need. Data that is stored on the hard disk is stored in sectors, however, to the Memory Management Unit (MMU) of the Operating System, it is seen as though it is main memory. Before an application requests to run, the swap file is checked and if the data required by the application is found there, then it copies it over to memory first before executing it. Virtual memory is an excellent way of utilizing more memory than is physically available.  Moving and swapping data between the physical memory and hard disk via the system bus is managed by the MMU as are the logical and physical addresses of each block of data.

Windows determines how much hard disk space to allocate to virtual memory. The good news is that you can make your system faster by manually altering your Virtual Memory settings.  Follow these steps to get a noticeably faster PC:

1. Right click on My Computer and select Properties from the drop-down menu.  Then switch to the performance tab and select Virtual Memory.

2. Next, make sure the Let me specify my own virtual memory settings is selected.

3. From the Hard-Disk drop down list select your fastest hard disk if you have more than one.

4. Finally, make sure the Maximum & Minimum numbers are the same.  To get the optimum number, multiply your system RAM by 2.5 and then put that number for the Maximum and Minimum tabs.  For example, if you have 64MB of Ram, your Maximum and Minimum would be 160!