Windows relies on two types of memory — physical and virtual.
Physical memory is determined by the actual RAM installed in your system. In most systems, RAM is specified in multiples of 32 megabytes (MB). The majority of systems running Windows XP have at least 512MB of memory, and some may have as much as 4GB of memory.
Virtual memory is maintained by Windows in a special area on the hard drive known as a swap file or a pagefile. (It’s a sad commentary on geekdom that the words page and file have been used together so often that they’re now considered a single word: pagefile.) This special file is treated as an extension of your physical RAM. If a program or its data won’t fit in the available physical RAM, they’re stored in the pagefile.
The pagefile is also referred to as a swap file because the information in the file is “swapped” in and out of physical RAM, as the need arises.
For instance, say that Excel is open on your system. You haven’t opened a workbook in a while, so Windows shuffles the memory used by Excel to the pagefile. When you click the Excel task on the taskbar, Windows quickly stores another program’s memory into the pagefile and loads the Excel memory image from the pagefile into physical RAM.
The single biggest thing you can do to increase the performance of a Windows XP system is to add memory. Most systems have less memory than they should. Fortunately, memory prices continue to drop in price and cost a fraction of what they did a few years ago.
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