I am using Windows 7 64 bit with 8G ram. After some use, I feel Windows is getting sluggish. The drive is thrashing. When I look at the resource monitor and disk activity, I see a few instances of use of the page file (c:\pagefile.sys). I check the physical memory and I see about 2.3G available memory and 700M free memroy.

Why doesn't Windows use more of the free memory and less of the page file? Does it need to leave some x amount of free ram, how much would that be? Is it a percentage of physical ram?

My plan is get more ram and an SSD for the main drive. Meanwhile I am suffering from slow performance.