Disabling swap out for minimized applications.

[Sin Jeong-hun]

I've got 512MB ram installed. Maybe this is not much in these days, but
my average ram usage is about 300~400MB (TaskManager shows) and hardly
goes over 500.

Windows XP seems to swap out memory space for minimized applications
even though there are much free memory space and no application is
trying to acquire more memory. For example, if I have minimized
Microsoft Outlook for about 30 minutes, then try to restore the
window, there's severe hard disk noise and a notification balloon pops
up saying that Outlook may not be respoding and you can report this to
Microsoft.

Isn't there any registry value that tells Windows XP to swap out
minimized applications memory space only when the system's free memory
space is low?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Sin Jeong-hun,

No, as many programs are coded to do this by design. Also, a minimized
program or one not in active use may have its allocations moved to the
pagefile while another program is demanding processor attention. To attempt
to force the system to keep the data and program in ram when it's needed
elsewhere will result in a lack of memory for the more immediate
application.

If programs and data are not being retrieved correctly from the pagefile,
you might try disabling it and then restarting it after a reboot. The
pagefile.sys may be corrupted, so creating a new one might help.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org