How To: Speed up Windows XP and Vista performance by increasing the virtual memory

In this video tutorial, you'll learn how to increase your Windows performance by adjusting your virtual memory settings. This tweak applies to computers running Windows Vista or XP. If you are running a lot of applications, especially large resource hogs that eat huge amount of memory, your system may become unstable or even crash.

You can increase the total amount of memory in your system with a simple virtual memory adjustment. If your PC already has more than 3 gigabytes (GB) of RAM, you won't really need a page file. This tweak is intended for those who have less than 2 gigs of RAM.

Video notes:

Set the maximum and minimum size (MB) to the same size. This will prevent it from growing on your hard drive. Set the size to 1.5x times the size of your physical RAM.

If you have a PC with 2 gigs of RAM, for example, you would set the pagefile size to 3000 MB. Also remember that a pagefile is on the hard drive, which is slower than RAM, so the more your system uses a paging file, in some cases it may be slower.