it should be 1.5xram
1.5x512=768
 
but I have set mine to equal size as the ram.
Look in the task manager under performace to see how much ram you're using, leave the task manager open and play a game or run something that consumes a lot of memory and see how much ram you have left.

windows 2000/XP will set it to 1.5x the ram, but this is a very bad way to do it. The amount of swapfile needs is based on the amount of ram. For example, if you have 1 gig of ram, you don't need a swap[file at all. but winodws would still set it at 1.5 gigs.
 
1.5 gigs of swapfile is lunacy.
 
768 swapfile with 512 is also lunacy.
 
basically, the less ram you have the more swapfile you will need.
 
For 512 MB ram I would recommend 250-300 megs for the average user. if you use heavy amounts of compressing video and newshgroup binary downloads, then youll need 512 tops.

i will agree with duhmez.i have 1,5gb ram and i set my swapfile to 100mb.
no problem at all, and the system run fine.but if you use programs like maya,3dmax etc. you need more swapfile....

It also all depends on how you use your system. i know Alec would likely talk to u about this, i beleive it was Alecstarr.
 
 
for my over clocked system - i turned it off with 512 - as i do not use anything that uses 512 of pc3200.
 
now on my dell here with 512 of pc800 - i use my swapfile especially when i got a million and one windows open and Photoshop which i have set to use %60 of my memory
 
got to buy more!

My PF usage (assuming the value on the performance tab of taskmanager is the value we are mesuring here) for my system on boot is 56Mb, with most of my favourite web browsers/mp3 players/IM clients etc open its about 160Mb.
 
However with a Game like RTCW on top of that it can be anywhere from 650Mb to almost a Gb. I currently have the page file split between 2 HDs 50/50 with a total size of 768Mb. Can I get away with less than this with such a hog like RTCW?

if you have 2 hard drives/partitions then i recommend taking the swap file off the system partition entirely. As for pagefile, just run a log and see how much of the page file is being used when you play RTCW. This way you will get an idea of how much of the page file is used and you can set it accordingly.

^^^^
 
Yep - makea seprate partitionj on a sperate drive for your VM if u can, if not, even just a seprate partition on the same physical hard drive.

I have set it to a perminant size of 300Mb on my secondary HD and all is well.

Trying that out myself m8