@First paragraph: Ah, ok. So basically I cant lower virtual ram in any way? I'm just trying to force stuff off the hard disk and into the physical RAM until it's used up, if that's possible.
All I'm saying is that the Windows memory manager is very good at what it does, and you shouldn't try to do that. If you succeeded, as soon as you created a new process, what happens when you run out of space?
For example, my computer at home has 2gb of RAM. My typical working set is roughly 350mb at about 52 processes. WoW by itself has a working set (once I've been in for a while) of about 840mb, which is insane.
Let's say that I had 1gb of RAM. I likely wouldn't be running WoW at the same resolution, but here's what would happen if I had the minimum total virtual memory set up:
I run WoW, its working set gets to 840 mb. Suddenly a background process gets an interrupt (perhaps an incoming network connection), so part of some other process gets paged out because the interrupted process incurred a page fault. Most likely because part of the kernel needs to stay in memory (the page tables and memory manager), part of WoW gets swapped out. The background process runs its time quanta, and the thread scheduler puts WoW back on because it's the foreground task. The swapped-out WoW memory page faults, and so we pull it back in.
When you're running with low virtual memory, the system has to spend more time in kernel context switches and in kernel functions because it tends to page fault more often (because more physical memory is in use). If you have free physical memory, page faults can read the memory from disk, but don't require swapping memory out of other processes.
If you want to improve pagefile usage, set your pagefile size to 0 on all drives, restart, and set your pagefile to a constant size and restart again (do this by setting the pagefile to a custom size specifying the same value in the minimum and maximum fields; see the attachment for more information about where that is). Since the pagefile is reserved space, this helps to prevent pagefile fragmentation and dynamic resizing by Windows, which can get to be expensive.
For even better pagefile performance, allocate the pagefile on a RAID-0 volume (this is done by having two dynamic disks and creating a Striped Volume in disk manager). However, this requires that you have at least three disks present in the computer (one disk with the OS and two dynamic disks).
