Use your hard disk space as a RAM

Low RAM capacity slows down your computer speed significantly. You cannot work smoothly in a computer when it is getting slow and slow. Even though the computer speed depends on several hardware parts and their capacity/speed, you can speed up a computer by installing additional RAM card. Sometimes you may not increase RAM due to not available ram slots in the mother board. Changing motherboard can be cost effective task to fix this problem. Don't worry...... there is a solutions for this.

Windows XP comes with a special feature to increase your RAM by using your Hard Disk. It is called Virtual Memory. Also known as Paging File. You can allocate some space from your hard disk to use as a virtual memory. By default Windows XP comes with a virtual memory size of 1.5 times of RAM. (If your RAM capacity is 256MB, Virtual memory will be 384MB). This is space uses when the RAM going low in capacity.

You can change paging file or the virtual memory size and the partition of the hard disk where paging file exists at anytime as you wish. But there is few guidelines to optimize virtual memory.

• Avoid allocating virtual memory on the same partition where the system installed - Your system partition is heavily accessing drive by the operating system and because of that it will slow down the data read and write speed. And also cause to limit free space of the system partition which usually slows down the PC speed.
  
• Do not put a paging file on a fault-tolerant drive such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume. Paging files do not require fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant computers experience slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.
• Do not put multiple paging files on the different partitions of the same hard disk. Use only one paging file on one hard disk. If your computer consists two or more hard disks, you can create paging files in each hard disk.

How to change paging file/virtual memory

1. Click Start, click Run, and then type sysdm.cpl in the Open box.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Settings under Performance.
3. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Change under Virtual memory.
4. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file that you want to change.
5. Under Paging file size for selected drive, click Custom size, type a new paging file size in megabytes (MB) in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

Changing windows paging file size needs restart of your computer to make changes.