You computer now may well have 2/4/6 or even 16Gb of RAM, but Windows is still using the swap file, primarily now for application compatibility.  With this file always growing and shrinking in size on your hard disk it’s building up a fragmentation problem that will eventually slow down file access to your hard disk and that, potentially, could lead to data corruption.

Now, both of those scenarios with modern hardware are worst case, but it’s always a good idea to manually manage the Windows swap file.  Why do I say this?  Because while I can’t guarantee an unmanaged swap file will cause slowdown and data corruption, I can positively guarantee that a properly managed swap file won’t.

You access the swap file properties in the Control Panel by selecting the System panel.  In the left hand panel (Vista and Windows 7) click the Advanced system settings link.

In the Window that appears, you’ll see the Advanced tab open by default.  In the Performance section you need to click on the Settings button.

At this point a new Window will appear.  Under the Virtual Memory tab click the Change button to set the virtual memory manually.

At the next Window (seen below) there are several things you need to do.

1. Untick the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives option.
2. Choose the Custom Size option
3. Set both the Initial size and Maximum size options to the Recommended value at the bottom of the window. NOTE: both values must be identical.
4. Press OK to finish.  The changes will take effect the next time you restart your computer but there’s no need to do this immediately.

Some people have questioned whether you should keep your paging file on the same disk as Windows is installed in your computer if that hard disk is an SSD.  The reason for this is that a paging file makes many millions of read and write requests over the lifetime of that copy of Windows, many more times that of any other file.  The argument is that this can significantly reduce the lifetime of your SSD which has a maximum lifespan of so many read and write requests.

Conversely, other people will say that moving the paging file away from the SSD will slow down Windows and undo some of the good of having it installed on an SSD in the first instance.

This is a decision you’ll have to make for yourself and it comes down to a personal choice.  I’m not convince that moving the paging file away from Windows will affect performance adversely and on my own computer the power management powers-down the hard disk after a period.  This means that when I come to access a file from it I always suffer a delay while the computer spins it up again.  Having the swap file on the hard disk and not the SSD would get around this secondary issue.

On the image above you can see on my own computer the Windows 7 partition is highlighted.  It’s here that I’ve got my own swap file stored.  Before moving the file to another disk simply click on the appropriate hard disk or partition in the list that you see.  The next time you reboot the swap file will be moved to this other disk instead.

Minimem is available as a portable and installer for the Windows operating system. It can optimize all running processes of a Windows operating system. Unlike other programs of its kind it offers the user the choice to select the processes that should be memory optimized.

Minimem will only display processes that use more than 15 Megabytes of computer memory. It is possible to change the value to predefined values between 5 and 100 Megabytes. The memory limit can be turned off as well to display all processes in the interface.

Some or all of the active processes that are shown in the interface need to be moved to the left side which indicates that Minimem should optimize them. This gives the computer user excellent control of the optimization process.

Minimem will optimize the computer memory of the selected processes ever 30 seconds by default. This can be changed to several predefined values between 5 and 1200 seconds as well. Minimen will not optimize the active process by default. The program will also skip optimization of the available computer memory is larger than 300 Megabytes. These settings can also be changed in the program interface.

The memory optimization works surprisingly well. Users will see huge memory drops for some of the selected processes, e.g. a drop from 230 Megabytes to 90 Megabytes for a Firefox process or a drop from 33 Megabytes of computer memory to 9 Megabytes for the Winamp process. All of that without a noticeable drop in performance or a rise in virtual memory.

How does the optimization work?

It optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes. It does so at regular intervals which can be user-defined as well and every 30s by default, though uses an advanced pooling mechanism to ensure the CPU usage of Minimem remains low at all times. This then optimizes your applications which can load those pages back whenever they need, and makes your overall system perform much better whenever it is memory limited.

Not all applications benefit in the same way from the computer memory optimizer. Web browsers and other memory hungry programs will benefit the most. Minimen is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. It is a highly recommended computer program for users who want to optimize their computer memory.

For a 2 Gigabyte system it would mean between 2 and 6 Gigabyte of virtual memory preferably taken from a secondary hard drive and not the system partition. The Virtual Memory to low warning pops up if the RAM and virtual memory are not able to store all the data needed and there are basically two solutions for this.

The first one would be to install more RAM. If you run Windows Vista with 512 Megabyte you will have an overall experience of slowness and might experience the virtual memory to low warning quite often even if you set that value to 1.5 or 2 Gigabytes. I would suggest to increase the RAM to 2 Gigabyte (or 4 Gigabyte) if you have the budget.

Ram is not that expensive currently and you can get 4 Gigabytes for as low as $75 plus shipping at Newegg currently. (make sure your computer is compatible and read the reviews).

If adding more RAM is not an option you can try to raise the virtual memory itself and move it to another hard drive if one is available. Depending on the settings already in place I would choose a value of at least twice the RAM amount and at least 2 Gigabytes.

You can check the virtual memory setting by pressing the [Windows Pause] keys which should open System Properties. Click on the Advanced tab and there on settings under Performance.

Click again on the Advanced tab and you will see the Virtual Memory setting at the bottom. Reducing background applications could also help getting rid of the Virtual Memory too low warning message.