Perhaps you'd tell me why that's a 'facepalm' move? As mentioned I don't use CAD, or do photo editing, or other professional tools that could use 8Gigs of ram for undos and changes while working (closest I can think of is a video rendering tool which keeps track of maybe the last 16 frames for compression, and that's usually way under 1080p).

So please, Grace me with your wisdom, tell me how with currently 16Gigs of ram why I need a massive, slower resource of my hard drive or thumb drives to do the job of my Ram? Should I instead downgrade to 2Gigs and use Virtual memory heavily?

Please tell me, I need to know!

But, why not? It takes about fifty nanoseconds to dump RAM and mark it as available. Why would you care what the system does with resources that you aren't actively using? RAM uses about, what, two Watts per stick? Half a Watt for the high efficiency stuff coming down the pipeline?

I get that you'd hate to have a program not release resources - that's the definition of a memory leak, yeah? But what reason would you have to care if Windows caches up your frequently used programs, or indexes like Monk wrote the code?

Because it's shitty memory management. Doing after you already need it, results in crappy performance because not only are you now having to page files out at that time, but you're also executing a program that's likely to be hitting the disk and processor harder than when the machine is mostly idle.

The point is that you waste a ton of resources caching things that you haven't asked to run and then those resources aren't as easily available for the things that you do run.

You must be aware, though, that even a single application can require more memory than RAM is available and use both RAM and virtual memory at once, easily leading to a growing page file if managing the page file size is left to the operating system. That alone means that a notable growth of the page file can very well be an indication for insufficient RAM.

How often does that happen though? That's not something I've ever seen happen.

The OS seriously should throw the 'out of memory' error if you try to use a certain level above the actual ram you have. How much i'm not sure, maybe 50% more than the physical ram you have. Just because in theory you can run a 64Gig program on 64Mb of ram doesn't mean it makes sense to.

Virtual Memory has ALWAYS been a crutch in my opinion; Sure back when there was often 16-64Mb of ram you needed it. But as Ram has became considerably cheaper, and more popular, and in the Gigabytes the requirement hasn't gone away when it should have. Most computers off the shelf (in Walmart for example) or in catalogs often have minimal listing for hardware, usually little more than what you need to run the actual OS on.

Pre-caching can be useful and have little impact if done well. It's a good optimisation technique. If it's done right it's more beneficial than detrimental. Microsoft has been playing with it over the years, hopefully it's decent now. Vista definitely went overboard, but 7 is much better, and I imagine that 8 and 10 even better.
I ran City of Heroes on a PC with 512MB of RAM. Took about 15 minutes just to get to the first screen. That was in XP. Windows 7 with Readyboost cut that down by about a factor of 10.
Virtual memory and paging go hand in hand but aren't the same. Virtual memory is pretty much a must, giving each program its own memory area without access to what other programs are doing.

Anyway, paging is a useful crutch. If you use more RAM than is physically available only occasionally, having a fallback is useful.

Protected mode really is what pushed having each program with it's own block of memory, and that was with virtual address space.

I can't say you're really wrong, but Virtual Memory as far as how windows refers to usually means paging/swapping memory and not hardly anything else. Guess it's the terminology i've gotten used to in the last 15 years.

I suggest setting it to 0% IF YOU HAVE 16 / 32GIGS of RAM and windows 10 otherwise leave as is

I'm pretty sure you have, it used to be the norm in the late 90's / early 2000's and it's still an easy thing to achieve with all kinds of software even without memory leaks. Heck, you just have to turn the graphics up to the max in a game where the recommended RAM requirements are well above the amount you have available. Just fire up games like the ARMA series or GTA IV, which have insane upper limits for the graphical settings. The latter even has an indicator bar on the options screen that compares the game's memory requirements at the chosen settings to the amount of memory available. Turn everything up to the max and the performance will go to shit due to constant swapping very soon, the game constantly freezing as you move and especially look around. Also using image or video editing software as well as digital audio work stations can still easily fill up all your RAM and make the application swap constantly.

Wait, you mean Skyrim is so easy on the GPU even an integrated Intel can play it? And modded to boot?? Or are the new Cherry Trail Atoms Intel GPUs way better than the Intel 3000? I mean, I got dedicated 540M which runs Skyrim on Ultra, but I'm surprised an *integrated* GPU is able to run it.

Around 15FPS on low.

I said >tried :)
>tried

:)
:)

HD3000 (on an i7) runs it better than a NVS4200M actually (Thinkpad T420, still waiting for my new latpop at work, a P-series beast :)) for some weird reason. But maybe it's because I'm using drivers meant for AutoCAD and they don't have that much optimization. Who knows.

I remember getting closer to 5FPS... Which is one reason i didn't want to buy/get the game back when it was given to me since i lacked the hardware to run it.

Then got aggravated with requiring steam in order to install & run it.

Any graphics card can run just about any game...

That doesn't mean they do them very well. I'm reminded of the N64 emulator of old where you can go full software mode, and you got maybe 2 frames a second, this was back with a 400mhz machine back in the late 90's.