No, you may or may not need a swap file.  But doesn't need to be 1.5 to 3 times real memory.  Actually it can't be greater than two gigabytes on a two gigabyte PC.  I would suggest about 500 mbytes and see if you get any out of memory errors.

Supporting opinion also comes from The Windows XP Tweaking Companion -

"Although there are many differing opinions on how big the pagefile should be, one rule every Windows XP expert agrees on is never 'disable' your pagefile regardless of how much RAM you have. Windows XP needs a pagefile in order to operate correctly. Setting the pagefile to zero or a tiny size does not speed up your performance by 'forcing' XP to use physical RAM. Windows XP's memory management does not work that way..."

 

"To accurately determine the optimal pagefile size you should see how much memory your most memory intensive programs use and then set the pagefile to comfortably accommodate this. A rough and ready way of doing this is to configure your Task Manager as specified under the Task Manager section, then run what you believe is your most memory-intensive application or game and use it for a period of time. Then without quitting the game or application, bring up the Task Manager and check the peak memory usage figure for the largest process under the Processes tab - this should indicate how much memory the program usually needs. Also after a period of time using various applications and games on your system, open up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab, then check the Peak figure under the 'Commit Charge (K)' section - this is approximately the maximum amount of memory in KB required so far by your system. These will give you an indication of how much total memory you need when going through the next step."

 

"Since the total memory available to Windows XP is a combination of your Virtual Memory plus your 'Real Memory' (System RAM), you should ensure that the sum of these two is sufficiently large to prevent Windows from running out of memory. In general, I suggest a minimum of 2GB (2048MB) for your Virtual Memory + RAM:
Example: If you have 256MB of RAM set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1792MB each.
Example: If you have 512MB of RAM, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1536MB each.
Example: If you have 1024MB (1GB) of RAM, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1024MB each.
Example: If you have 2GB of RAM or more, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 200MB each."

 

"Note that the common myth about the pagefile being '1.5 x RAM' or some other multiple is quite clearly counterintuitive. Consider the situation where you only have 128MB of RAM: setting the maximum pagefile size to 1.5 x 128MB = 192MB + 128MB = 320MB of total available memory for Windows XP which is obviously not going to give you enough memory for modern games and applications. Remember, it is about how much total memory (RAM + Pagefile) that should be made available for Windows to operate efficiently."

See this post for a link to the Tweaking Companion, submitted by SR45.

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=si_newusers&message.id=20484

 

GM