system stops using RAM and starts using virtual memory too soon

[particle]

First, I apologize for my previously canceled post. I somehow spaced when
typing the subject and wrote "disk cache" instead of "virtual memory." I
actually know the difference...honest!

My circumstances and my question:

I have XP Home on a P4 box with 768MB of RAM and have moved the page file to
its own partition on a secondary HD (drive G:\). The page file partition is
1GB and I've currently set the initial size to 500MB and the maximum size to
989MB (i.e., the maximum free space the partition showed as being
available).

I've been using Cacheman v5.50 to monitor the dynamics and have found that
the system begins ignoring the RAM and heavily accessing the HD (especially
whenever an application is launched) as soon as the amount of free RAM drops
to 300MB. Something seems wrong since I have 768MB of total RAM, 300MB of
which show to be free when it decides to start doing this.

I've tried setting the page file to both 0 init./0 max. and 0 init./989
max., but the system still wants to start using virtual memory when the free
RAM gets to about 300MB. Interestingly, from viewing file properties it
appears that the page file size never changes at any time after the virtual
memory has started to become accessed. And I've made sure there is only
*one* pagefile.sys on the system, and it's on drive G:\.

Has anyone else experienced similar behavior? Does anyone know of a way to
get my system to use all of its free RAM before calling upon virtual memory?

TIA
Tony

 

[Mike]

Windows has always done this.. it is in the design.. it enables users who
can't afford huge amounts of memory the ability to run the OS..