Well you don't need to do anything. It uses physical memory first. but there is a problem.
if you have 512 Physical your virtual I would suggest 512-1GB. Preferably shared equally between two drives. It just sits there and is not used.

Uykucu,
 
Thanks for the reply, but the page file IS being used, as reported by Task Manager, and more graphically, by Free Meter.
 
It seems to be about tandem with the physical memory usage (roughly).
 
I must admit, I am not a techie, so what does this mean in real world terms? Does Windows 2000 just allocate as reported and not use it, or am I suffering from having a large page file?
 
(I reset it to 768MB in light of your advice, though performance has not changed since the 384MB setting)
 
I just want to optimize the amount of free RAM that I have.
 
Cheers

The way it works is, windows will move stagnant sevices and processes to your page file to free up physical memory which obviously is a lot faster. So far I dunno a way to stop windows using it. However if you have 512 MB memory. the first 120-180 Mb of it is used by system and the rest by applications. and page file usually only goes and plays with itself.
 
So as a result you will not see any real performance increase or decrease if you use or not use the page file. But it is nice to have it large for the occasion when an application goes haywire with a memory leak and takes up 400Mb or so. It happens with adaptec ez CD sometimes. Than you have space to move around, and you can terminate the process more easily.
 
If you ask me not worth the effort, keep it as it is.

try Cacheman d/l and you can get rid of paging file completely, but be warned that winblows sucks at times when do without it. U are warned!

in my opinion do not. these are generally poorly written programs and cause a lot of trouble on the long run or unknown compatibility issues.