[CentOS] Postpone/avoid swaping while there is still free RAM.

Hi people,

I got Centos 4.3 on a 1GB Pentium IV machine. The output of free

------------------- $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1026896 573848 453048 0 2988 131712 -/+ buffers/cache: 439148 587748 Swap: 1052248 137568 914680 ------------------

There is plenty of free ram, but the kernel prefers to swap unused pages to disk. And later I have to wait for them to be unswapped, the Desktop looses its promptness - annoying.

In win2k and winXP there is a registry key property which prevents swapping while there is still RAM.

Do you know whether I can achieve the same in linux?

Best regards! alex