Quote from gnome:
More virtual memory would not help anything. The Page File is "virtual memory on the hard drive" and it's very slow by comparison to physical RAM... which is why Windows 'pages-out" low priority functions.
Windows XP is sooooo good at paging that rarely is more than 1GB of RAM necessary in a trading rig... and for that matter 512MB is usually plenty, too. (I know... saying "512 is enough" is computer heresy... mostly true however.)
that's generalized speak.
Trading is a varied activity.
An option trader/swing trader can use one screen on a 3 yrs old computer.
An arb or scalper might use 4 screens and a hyperspeed computer.
A trader can be anyone in between these 2 extreme.
Bill Gates once said 640k is all people needed.