Virtual mem keeps reverting back - want VM on separate drive

its a waste of time putting your page file on a separate drive unless your willing to make it the only thing on it.

thats the only time there will be any measurable difference as soon as you start writing to that other drive the page file will be swapped about as needed, exactly the same way it would be on a windows managed partition on the c drive.
the secret of good fast page files is set it to 1.5 times the actual amount of physical ram you have in your pc... so 4 gigs of ddr3 would require a page file of 6gig in size. a 12 gig ddr3 system would require a 16gig page file. yes you really do need to go that big... you can still run out of memory with 64gigs of ram doing certain things so if you have the ram you should always stick to 1.5 times for the page file.
you combine this rule of thumb with a good disk defrager you can move your dynamic page file to the outside of your c: disk and it will stay there instead of being moved all over the place by windows managed...

you do this by using something like ultimate defrag and use its ability to order your disk. move all your files to the inside with the auto function (us the options slider to pick the fastest and use the check dot to set the rest of the data to the inside tracks. let it run till its complete.

then remove the page file completely.
rightclick on mycomputer, select properties/advanced system settings under the perfomance tab select settings/advanced under virtual memory click change

at the bottom of this tab you will see 3 numbers, the minimum allowed the recomended and the current.
click custom
in the inital box look at the recomended and make it 1 less then set the max size to what is recomended... this should be 1.5 times you actual ram now... apply and reboot.

again run the defragger, click analize and you will see your newly created page file pretty much at the outside edge of the hdd in the fastest part of it. because its custom size and has been configered on empty drive space. it will sit there on the outside till you change it again. if you left it on windows managed it would get dynamically moved.
now you have 2 choices. you can eather run the defrag auto settings and move your data back to the outer tracks now behind for the most part the page file. or you can just run windows for the next 3 days and it will move the files it needs to the outside of the disk itself. basically as you use it windows will speed up....

now i know some will say mememe it works... it does but only if used like i said. any other way you may as well just use the c drive as there will be no difference and maybe even a cost. this was a good idea 10 years ago when drives were smaller and slower, so the difference was more pronounced.

as you have 8 gigs i recomend you switch to a 64bit o.s, but as it currently stands your pc will use a max of 4 so your page file needs to be 6gig and yes just put it on the outside tracks of your c drive... it may take a little more fiddling to get as far out on the disk as possible but auto will do just fine for most people.

by using a dedicated drive your system would see a slight increase in some applications but it would be so marginal that the wasted disk space would likely have more of an impact...

look at it this way. a typical image from a 2MP cam may contain 2048,2048 pixels (i know thats not correct but its an example). uncompressed in system memory it will unfold to 120mb bit map/raw data your typical hdd will run at 80-120mbps on average unless its a particularly fast 1 like the spinpoints/sata 3. so it will take you 1 second to dump that to the disk at best speed. at worst speed your looking at 1.2 seconds.
so its not a huge difference... yes its faster in throery but in practice theres to many variables that can negate the benefits because the benefits are so slim.

you do realize that the page memory is just for overspill. in most cases your pc wont use it and when they do its often only a tiny fraction of the available space. if your consistently relying on it then it means you dont have enough active system memory. this is a bigger problem as it will impact performance way more and do it negatively... video editing takes lots of ram. most semi pro''s use a minimum of 16gig while pros use 32 and up.

fact is if you switch to 64bit you will see a benefit much more pronounced than just swapping the page file to an empty drive...