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"Not exactly. The question is how much of the *physical* memory is used versus swapping to disk. Physical memory -- especially in notebooks with slow disks -- is much faster than paged memory. If you can keep most of your work in RAM instead of swap, everything will be faster. You can tell how much of physical memory is used, and this is what Norton is telling you. How much physical memory is loaded when you start the OS. For example, on this machine (a Cyrix P166+ with 64MB of RAM running Linux), the "top" command says I'm using 61464K of physical memory, 0K of swap (I'm running three copies of Netscape at the moment!). This is a perfectly valid measurement of memory use." This is quite confused. There is no distinction between physical memory and paged memory. There is only physical memory, which may be addressed using virtual addresses, but there is no special paged memory. There may be some pages locked in memory, but Norton knows nothing about that. Generally in any decent system, all of the physical memory will be in use all the time, because you do not eject stuff from memory until you need to. Your top command merely shows that 61M of memory is currently in use for something, but the something may be old executables no longer in use, which will be kept around until the space they occupy is no longer needed. At that time they will not be swapped out, but merely discarded. The fact that you see zero swap in use merely means that the active use of memory does not exceed the physical size. If you never see your physical memory full, then you have too much of it :-)