Virtual memory

With Windows XP it would make absolutely no difference. (And I'm not even sure that WinXP will allow you to disable it anyway.)

In old versions of Windows (9x/ME and I believe even NT4) new memory would always be allocated sequentially. Windows would only re-use memory that had already been allocated and then later freed once it had finally run out of new memory to allocate. This meant that the virtual memory was run through before the RAM itself started to get re-used. That's why disabling virtual memory for these old OSes could make a huge difference in performance.

With NT5-based OSes (WinXP, Win2K, etc.) Windows started re-using memory that had been freed earlier whenever possible. This means that virtual memory is therefore never accessed unless you actually run out of physical memory, and thus there's no reason to disable virtual memory anymore.

<pre><A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030905" target="_new"><font color=black>People don't understand how hard being a dark god can be. - Hastur</font color=black></A></pre><p>