Do I need a new computer?

[synkr0nized]

Originally Posted by Kerensky287

EDIT: According to a website I saw, deleting the page file should give you "an extra few hundred MB free." My page file was 1.5GB. Is that a bad thing?

Some websites and individuals will recommend running without a page file. This can work, provided you have enough system RAM. However, in your case, I would not recommend it.

The swap/page file (quite literally called pagefile.sys on Windows machines, normally a dedicated swap partition on Linux machines, and I couldn't tell you at the moment what the Macintosh OS does, whoops) represents space on your hard drive used as virtual RAM. When a computer loads programs and data, it reads the relevant information from your hard disks, permanent storage devices, to the memory, temporary storage devices (RAM loses all data when there is no charge/electricity sent to it, whereas data remains in disk drives) that can handle operations and communication with the processor(s) with much greater speed than disks. The more you multi-task and do, the more RAM is used. Once you run out of free space in your physical memory (what you have as the RAM chips), the operating system has to decide what to cycle out when putting new data in (thrashing). The page file on your hard drive acts as a place to put such information so that it it's not just removed outright -- more correctly, it acts as an additional section of virtual addressable memory for programs to use; when you run something memory-intensive, your total system memory including this file gets used more often. Reading and writing to this file, on the disks, is much less efficient than the RAM chips and can cause noticeable performance drops. Removing it outright forces the machine to go fetch the original data again whenever it can't find it in memory (page faults), an even slower process.

Basically, at any rate.

A typical rule of thumb is to have a swap file that is somewhere in the range of 1-2 times the size of the RAM you have, so it's not surprising that yours was 1.5 GB alongside your 1 GB RAM. If you were to upgrade your system's RAM to 2 GB or more I would expect you'd see a noticeable improvement or change when running some of these games.