Page Faults: What the HELL are they?

[hbooraem]

Okay folks, here's the question: What is a page fault? And, is it a good thing, or a bad thing?
Note, please, that I am NOT talking about page fault ERRORS (Blue Screen type errors). Using System monitor in Windows 95 (B) you can monitor the number of page faults the operating system experiences. Are page faults a bad thing? If this number reaches any positive integer above 10, should I be concerned?
The system experiencing the page faults (and it is a LOT of them), is a Dell Dimension XPS H266, with 128MB Kingston EDO RAM (2 64MB SIMMs), running Windows 95B from a clean install. The page faults spike to over 300 every time anything is done on this system, and they seem to correspond with hard drive reads.
Any suggestions, websites, etc, will be greatly appreciated.

[Banti]

Real quick...

Windows manages memory using pages. You can think of this like text on a page in a dicitionary. Each page contain info and each page is indexed. These pages are contained in two places physical memory (your 128 SDRAM) and virtual memory (your swap space). A page fault is simply when your program (win95) fails to see the info it wants in physical memory, and it must start looking virtual memory to find it. If it fails to find it in virtual memory you might get a BSOD.

These are not bad, but they might decrease system performance. You could adjust the size of your swap space if you wanted, but I am sure you will see very little change.

So once again these page faults are not bad, just extra info for you to watch.

Banti