My desktop came with 1 gb and I recently purchased an additional 2 gigs,
which gives me a total of 3 gigs of system memory. In my previous computer, I
used to manually configure the memory myself. I did that because I read an
article that said the Win XP Memory Swap file is constantly expanding and/or
contracting and that is not very efficient However, I also read articles
where people say it's better to allow Windows to manage system memory.
I'm open to suggestions.
Several points:
1. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "configure the memory."
Memory doesn't need to be configured, and there really are no
configuration settings.
2. Are you talking about settings for the page file--virtual memory?
The expanding/contracting you are talking about is not any kind of
problem. You can sometimes save a little disk space by configuring
the swap file yourself (if you do it correctly; most of the advice you
see on how to do it is simply wrong), but in these days of large
inexpensive hard drives, that's nearly meaningless for most people.
Letting Windows handle it is fine.
3. Unless you run particularly memory-hungry applications, 3GB of RAM
is way overkill for almost everyone. In fact even your original 1GB is
more than most people can make effective use of. My guess is that
adding the 2GB made no performance difference to you at all. Despite
the many people who continually repeat "the more memory the better,"
that's true only up to a point. For most people that point is
somewhere between 256-512MB, and except for those doing something like
editing videos or large photographic images, is almost always no
greater than 1GB.
Since you probably have more RAM than you can use effectively, for you
in particular, page file settings hardly matter at all. You will
hardly ever use the page file.
4. The best information on the page file is "Virtual Memory in Windows
XP" by the late MVP Alex Nichol, at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm I
recommend that you read there.
