seems to be a common question without a common answer. I've read that you do not want the inital and max size different for risk of fragmenting the swap file. The most popular answer I found was tp set both your initial and max size at double the size of your physical RAM.

I've also seen a tip that you should do the following to optimize:

1. set the size to 0 MB

2. reboot in safe mode

3. run diskdrive defrag

4. reset the swap file size to the desired setting

5. reboot

But what do I know.....

 

I understand that on UNIX systems, it was helpful to set your swap file as a multiple of your RAM. However, that is not the case with Windows. With Windows, your machine will need a certain amount of memory depending on what your machine is actually doing. If it needs more than available with your RAM, it will need to use the swap file/paging file for that extra memory. If the total needed memory is 1GB and you have 512MB of RAM, you will then need to use 512MB of your disk space as virtual memory. However, if you have 2GB of RAM instead of the 1GB, you will not need any hard disk space to emulate RAM.

This machine has 3GB of RAM, so I set the paging file at only 100MB. I could probably do just as well without any paging file at all, but I leave a small one just in case I might happen to use software that requires one.

Be careful in setting a max setting. If you do set it (which potentially has some benefits), make sure you really monitor your maximum memory usage, and make sure you set it above that.

This might help:
http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/hardware/page1435.cfm