I've heard some mixed views on this. What is the recommended amount to allot for paging on a system with currently 256mb ram? Some say, add the difference to get 1 gig in dual measurement. Others warn of PF usage in games actually slowing down your game if accessed on demand and almost discourage use of it at all (that'll make sense to anyone who knows about PF's). Watcha think? ;)

The general rule of thumb usually given is: the page file should be twice the size of your physical RAM.

It is also much more efficient if it's a fixed size (rather than a range of values) and created on an empty or recently defragmented drive/partition (as the file will never become fragmented that way).

To add to what was said quite succinctly above, with the size of hard disks these days there's no reason not to set it quite large, say 2 gig or more even when you only have 256mb.

Another rule that's useful to know when you have two or more physical disks, is that the swapper is most efficiently placed on the most used partition on the least used hard disk

My general rule of thumb is to set it at one to two times the amount of memory. So in your case, between 256 and 512 MB. And I always, always, ALWAYS make it fixed. If you don't, Windows will burn cycles resizing it for you... and it will do that when you most need those cycles.

And I agree with Sir Krustin (at least partially). My swap file on my main PC is on drive D, not drive C. Most of my application stuff is on drive C, and separation is good. I find 2GB of virtual memory a little hard to swallow, though, but if you've got something that consumes that much memory, and your system can support it, set it up there... :D

If you plan to use the other HDD, ensure it is not the slave to the main HDD. Nothing like bottlenecking your PGF on the same cable.

Operating System's are far more advanced now, yeah right! Stick to 1-2 x physical. I have 1 GB physical, and 2 GB virtual, on the opposite HDD of the main drive, spare is the master of IDE channel 2.

Games do in fact like to run amuck, stick to a fixed amount ie: 1gb min 1gb max. And don't have video BIOS turned to "Shadow" on, you should not have any issues.