SP2 did not resolve HDD/SWAP crazyness (Score 1)

Sometimes I feel like smashing my comp or repartitioning HDD when I think about windows swap behaviour. Then I remember I have still unfinished projects on windows. When I run linux with 512MB of RAM, then it STARTS to use swap ONLY when this memory is used up. When I run windows, it seems, that it writes EVERYTHING to SWAP and then retrieves memory pages only when really nessecary. And what does it use all the free memory for? o yeah, caching! It's absolutely nessecary to swap out all the possible memory to copy 600MB file over the net, just because it's fun to release the memory when the copy operation finishes and watch continued HDD torture when I switch back to recent app. On laptop this renders system pretty unusable for minutes after the copy. And of course it's Very Funny to see, that system has 100..200MB FREE MEMORY and HDD led just doesn't go off after switshing to app left to the backround for a while. And this is "tuned" system. Bloat-services switched off, many registry settings optimized, resident("update-clients") portions of various popular "default" software removed, so on. Seems like it's absolutely no use to do all this shit, as inactive programs will be swapped out of memory anyway after few seconds of idle time or when they stay on the background for few minutes.. And as I discovered after many days of frustrating web-search .. All this behaviour is totally normal and "correctly working" feature of windows!!! I know now there are different hacky-smelling "solutions" for this, like various "memory-optimizers" and shit, but why-oh-why would I need any memory optimizing with 512MB and 200MB constantly free in the first place?!?! If that's not "buggy" .. what is? Oh yea: even brand new CLEAN XP SP2 with 512MB RAM running doom3 (pretty well) for hour or two starts to freak out with the same swapping horror. Restarting DOOM3 will reset the situation. So this XP Starter Edition is really good thing: opening one app and closing it before opening nextone seems to be the way microsoft thinks computers should be used these days.