Aye, will have a look at the swap file thingy, just got back from my siss and am formatting the 1tb drive now.
ArcGIS is an evil, bloated piece of software. Its one of those things where just because the min specs are quite low, doesnt mean you should even consider using them. Its a bit like doing 3D rendering with a min spec, or worse spec, computer. Itll do it, but it could take 24 hours to process a file (seriously!). Worst Ive had with my comp is 30 mins to render a single map, and having to do that for about 50 maps.
I have just found the page file settings in control panel, and can change it from system managed to custom initial&max size. Any recommendations on size of the page file?
Looked at the ArcGIS site, its even OK to use it with my ancient w2k. My point with the swap/temp/paging issue needs you to get into the system control area not just find out how much is in use or available. Its how it is set up not how much is in use. If it remains at the default of dynamic you are very likely to get pregnant periods of nothing much apparently happening ie system latency. Particularly if you are habitually throwing huge files and/or busy programmes in and out... Its a control panel thing, you set up up the minimum or starting value to be ?MB (not the usual 1MB) and the maximum value to be the same ?Mb. That way there is no rubber banding of swap file capacity and, depending on your resources, less latency. What you lose is that amount of HDD space that is permanently allocated to the now unchanging swapfile. M$ usually defaults to dynamic, its a hangover from the old days.
My level of windows does not fully respond to even 4GB let alone 8GB so Im unable to properly comment. My gut feeling is that you very probably do need more memory for your GIS stuff. When I had 2GB installed my various cameras RAW file rendering performance was excrutiatingly slow ~ much HDD LED flickering. Even with what I had then thought was ample memory the renderer got badly paged by the OS. Installing another 2GB (despite it NOT being fully recognised by the M$ OS) freed things up massively and the HDD activity LED barely flickers while the RAW is rendered into a 120MB TIFF. As maxing out w2k with 4GB of RAM was mandatory here, given the widely acknowledged bloat factor of Vista, I would imagine maxing that OS out for your GIS purposes is likely to be necessary.