I run Windows Vista on an up to date HP notebook. I started having problems with internet browsers freezing, in particular Internet Explorer. I also noticed programs not related to the internet would also freeze sometimes like nVidia 8600 GS. I updated all my drivers, updated Anti-virus and did every suggestion I could find online, but nothing seemed to work. I finally found an article that said, increase the virtual memory on Windows Vista as it might not allocate enough. I was skeptical, but getting desperate. I allocated virtual memory on both my hard drives for a maximum of 7.13 GB for 2GB of physical RAM. It absolutely makes no sense, but my crashing and freezing for the most part is now minimal, but not 100% gone. Also, my anti virus scans went from 4 hours or so to just 1 hour and 10min a great improvement.

Anyone know more about this phenomenon? I remember learning in school you don't need a swap file much bigger than physical memory as used for redundancy with Windows 2k and after? I'm wondering if my nvidia drivers are a suspect of the freezing and program crashes?

Ps - Physical ram checks out as okay although windows registers alot of 'hard faults' during a program freeze.