Page file size discrepancy

I have a system with a separate physical hard drive dedicated for swap file use. The hard drive is 15 gigs, but I allocated 1 gig for swap file usage. I have 512 megs of RAM.

SiSoft Sandra warns me that my swap file is too large. It recommends that it be 2.5 times my RAM... but that would be more than the gig I have allocated...

If I look at Sandra's report, it says my maximum page file size is 1500 MB. I don't understand why it thinks this.

Meanwhile, Windows itself recommends just over 700 MB for swap file size.

Is my virtual memory setup appropriate? Why does Sandra think it is too large (and why does it think that it 1500 when I have it set to 1000)?

Thank you.

I run everything from telnet clients to software development IDEs to online games. The swap file is still used for two reasons. First, Windows uses it even if it's not out of RAM (ask someone else why, I don't know). Second, 512 MB does get used when running a taxing game or enough other applications.

I always get less hard drive thrashing after a fresh install, and I suppose that is intuitive... but I have no concrete reason why. Are services that suck up all my RAM secretly installed as time goes on? (It is hard to tell what all those svchost.exe's are doing, after all). I don't know.

Thanks.

I have 384 megs and run my system stable and fine without any swapfile in xp. Try it! The downside is that some jerk-applications still want swap even though I have enough ram, and some games, but overall I try to have my swap at 0 bytes.. Or if I need it, never more then 300 megs and no more complains from programs not running...