I currently have an asus laptop with an i5 second gen processor. I upgraded the ram to 8 gig of ddr3. when the computer is idle the ram usage is: hardware reserved 89mb, modified 410mb, standby 1475 and free 4184mb. Is it necessary to utilise virtual memory in this instance? And will disabling it speed up my system or create problems. also, windows recommends having 12154mb of virtual memory. I can't see why it would need so much. can anybody help?

The figure you see recommended there is the Windows default, which allows for the creation of a full memory dump if you get a BSOD. If you set Windows to create a small memory dump, it's safe to experiment to find your optimal virtual memory size. I was involved in making a few replies in a discussion on paging files a few days ago, check in my profile for that thread from the point I entered the discussion, there are a couple of links there that are useful, as is I think, the discussion itself.

The memory usage that you quoted in your post is very small, unless you made an error. Letting Windows automatically manage the virtual memory(page file) will not cause any performance issues with the hardware that you have. The i series processors and chipsets manage hardware resources differently than previous processors and chipsets. The recommended size was typically 1.5 x the physical memory, which is what you intended to quote. What is the actual current size? What's the Windows Experience Index (WEI) for this system? The slowest component is ? (lowest score) I see no reason to change anything. Let Windows automatically manage the virtual memory until you have an issue.

If you really want to tune your virtual memory size to one which suits your computer and the usage you put it to, there are links and methods discussed in this post. This would be especially useful to owners of small capacity single drives such as SSD's; freeing up 4-8GB of storage space on a 64-128GB drive is a useful percentage.

On Sat, 9 Jul 2011 10:56:55 +0000, temtemtem wrote: I currently have an asus laptop with an i5 second gen processor. I upgraded the ram to 8 gig of ddr3. when the computer is idle the ram usage is: hardware reserved 89mb, modified 410mb, standby 1475 and free 4184mb. Is it necessary to utilise virtual memory in this instance? And will disabling it speed up my system or create problems. also, windows recommends having 12154mb of virtual memory. I can't see why it would need so much. can anybody help? Please don't post the same question twice. I answered it in your other post. Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP