Is it a bad thing to disable virtual memory on Windows XP?
Like 99.9% people out there with the Windows operating system, virtual memory is enabled by default. Recently, switching between applications (say from Firefox to Photoshop) in the taskbar had been incredibly slow. I suspect that it has to do with virtual memory looking through its swap file to find the memory related to Photoshop, because I can hear the hard drive working. Right now, I disabled virtual memory and programs have been running fine so far. I do understand that operating systems recommend people using virtual memory, but recently, the prices of RAM have been inexpensive and plentiful that virtual memory doesnt seem to be a necessary thing. Besides, it slows down my computer significantly. I havent found any articles from googling that discussed about disabling virtual memory. Besides taking up physical memory on RAM, are there any other disadvantages in having no virtual memory?
Heres my current PC setup if anyones curious:
P4 2.53 GHz
512 MB RAM
120 GB Hard drive.
Windows XP SP1
Like 99.9% people out there with the Windows operating system, virtual memory is enabled by default. Recently, switching between applications (say from Firefox to Photoshop) in the taskbar had been incredibly slow. I suspect that it has to do with virtual memory looking through its swap file to find the memory related to Photoshop, because I can hear the hard drive working. Right now, I disabled virtual memory and programs have been running fine so far. I do understand that operating systems recommend people using virtual memory, but recently, the prices of RAM have been inexpensive and plentiful that virtual memory doesnt seem to be a necessary thing. Besides, it slows down my computer significantly. I havent found any articles from googling that discussed about disabling virtual memory. Besides taking up physical memory on RAM, are there any other disadvantages in having no virtual memory?
Heres my current PC setup if anyones curious:
P4 2.53 GHz
512 MB RAM
120 GB Hard drive.
Windows XP SP1