@bloodline: Ah, that's what I thought. I'm still just upset about the 16/32/64 bit hype of the old game consoles. The 64-bit [graphics bus only] Jaguar comes to mind. ;-)
@vortexau: Exact memory usage is hard to gague, and the swap files isn't always the problem. Background tasks can really mess up Windows good, too.
@MikeyMike: You're right, although I've never gotten my Win2K system stable with 512M RAM and no swap file. Weird things happen, like severe graphics glitches. Win98 did the same when I only had 32M RAM in my system. Strange, seeing how the two OS's use different cores.
My impression of virtual memory is that it's supposed to be used like a crutch: only when needed. If you enable the swap file, though, Windows constantly swaps out unused or infrequently used system parts out to disk, even parts of the kernel. Sounds like overkill to me, but then, Windows was never known for memory management. Remember "shaking" and those long, unexplained pauses while playing games under Win98 [first edition]? God, that really sucked!
