virtual memory too low?

Question

How do i put this right,i've had a quick look at some other answeres,but have no idea what RAM is,what does it mean,do i need to download anything to help,i'am still at the very top of the icebeg where computers are concernd,and that has not even started to melt yet! how do do a disc clean up,all answeres welcome.many thanks Kathy

have i downloaded too much as i've yahoo toolbar,messenger,skype and ebay toolbar

Answer 1

OK, to change your virtual memory on the computer; simply right click your mouse on top of the "My Computer Icon". I'm hoping you are using the Windows XP version or Windows 2000. Make sure you are the administrator when you do this or at the very least have administrative rights. Choose properties; and then the advance tab; on the advance tab select settings for the performance settings; under the performance settings tab, choose the advance tab; and then select the advance option; select the background services; and then click on the change button. This is where you can increase the virtual memory settings to the desire level. I personally would set both at equal settings at 1500MB. Anything too higher will cause problems. Let me know if this helps.

Answer 2

RAM- Random access memory
If you see "virtual memory too low" warning it means that your computer is running low on memory. It might happen if you open too many applications at a time.
Try closing some unused applications or programme.
You can increase your virtual memory by installing another RAM on your computer motherboard.
Or you can increase your paging file by going to control panel> system> advance> performace> setting> advance> virtual memory> change
You can increase your paging file but don't increase too much as the memory for the paging file comes from the expense of your hard disk space.

Note: Paging file is an area on the hard disk that windows use as it were RAM

Answer 3

The simplest thing to try for starters is a defrag of your system.

I'm going to assume you are on a PC and using Windows

Go to the start menu and click on "Control Panel"

Then click on "Performance and Maintenance"

You will see two options choose the first "Free up space on your hard disk" It will ask you what driver (most likely this is C: and say OK)


After this has run go back to Peformance and Maintenance and choose "Rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs run faster"

You will see two buttons "Analyze" and "Defragment" choose "Defragment" and leave your computer for a while to run through it.

Finally, consider getting rid of some programs that you don't need.

At any time you can see the list of programs by going to start menu, control panel "add or remove programs"

It will take a moment to give you a list of everything installed. Only get rid of those programs you recognize and are sure you do not need.

You can also try taking files (word files, picture files, etc.) off your computer and rerunning a maintenance or defrag.

At the very worst you might need some more RAM installed in your computer to deal with the work load. This can be done at any computer store for you.

Answer 4

If you have a virtual memory problem it's likely you have either fixed the Swap file size too small or your hard drive is full. Ram is chip based memory and the virtual drive(Swap file) is on your hard drive. when your operating system has filled the RAM the rest goes to the hard drive in the swap file. 2 solutions, get more RAM and another hard drive. both are cheap and the benefit to speed is good! Good luck!

Answer 5

RAM is your Random Accses Memory, it is an internall memory stick that can easialy be upgraded. If you right click over my computer and click on properties, it will tell you how much ram you have, standard is between 256mb and 1gb. Ifyou are new to computers it is important to get someone that know what they are doing as there are alot of speeds and types of ram and the wrong one will slow you down further.

Answer 6

Seriously? virtual memory too low error doesnt always mean your ram is low, infact your ram should be fine, a faulty power source could have caused this problem. if you included more info like when you receive the error and what version of windows you are running how old computer is etc. that will be better to answer this question of yours.

Answer 7

I'm going to assume you're running Windows XP, and seeing a message stating "Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file." Unless you have very little physical memory (RAM) in your system, this message is indicative of a buggy application with a memory leak.

A memory leak is a common problem caused by poorly written or poorly debugged applications where they continually use more and more memory until you shut down the program, end the process manually or restart Microsoft Windows.

Virtual memory, also known as a page file or swap file, is a file on your hard drive (C:\pagefile.sys by default) that Windows and applications use in addition to physical memory (RAM) as needed. The default and recommended size of this file is 1.5 times the amount of physical memory. Virtual memory is the sum of physical memory and the page file. So if your computer has 512 MB RAM, it will have a 768 MB page file by default, for a total of 1.25 GB of physical + virtual memory.

Finding the source of the problem

First you need to determine which application is causing the problem.

Hit Control-Alt-Delete to bring up Task Manager (on certain XP Professional configurations you'll need to click the Task Manager button after hitting Control-Alt-Delete). You can also access Task Manager by holding down Control and Shift and pressing Escape.

Go to the Processes tab in Task Manager. Here you will see a list of all the processes (applications or parts thereof) that are running on your system. You will see the memory usage here, but in my experience this very rarely has anything to do with problems running low on virtual memory.

Click View, Select Columns.


Check the Virtual Memory Size box, as circled in the screen shot below and click OK.


Now you have a VM Size column in your Processes tab. Click the top of the VM Size column (as circled below) twice to arrange the processes by their VM Size from largest to smallest.


You'll see in this Task Manager shot that Mozilla Firefox is taking up the most virtual memory at about 237 MB, with Internet Explorer the next biggest at about 81 MB. (the number of KB divided by 1024 equals MB) For both, this is the consequence of leaving them open for more than a week straight. Almost every application will use more memory the longer you keep it open, though some are worse than others. This is one reason that Windows becomes more and more unresponsive the longer you keep it running, and why you end up eeding to restart your computer periodically.

Once you determine which process is using more virtual memory than it should, you need to determine what the process is. Some are pretty obvious, like winword.exe is Microsoft Word, iexplore.exe is Internet Explorer, and so on. Others aren't so obvious. The best way to determine the source of a specific process is to use a search engine to search for the Image Name as shown in Task Manager.

Resolution

Now that you know which application is causing the problem, let's resolve it.

One common thing to try is to uninstall and reinstall the offending application if possible. Searching the Internet, and checking the support site of the software vendor would be the next two steps I would try. Without knowing which application is at fault, it's difficult to recommend a specific solution.

Answer 8

Random Access Memory or RAM is a type of computer storage whose contents can be accessed in any order. This is in contrast to sequential memory devices such as magnetic tapes, discs and drums, in which the mechanical movement of the storage medium forces the computer to access data in a fixed order. It is usually implied that RAM can be both written to and read from, in contrast to Read-Only Memory or ROM

Answer 9

You need to explain, what you need to achieve first.

to increase your virtual memory, goto my computer and right click on the icon, choose properties and then choose advance tab, under performance, goto settings, then advance, under virtual memory, click change , here you can change it , usually twice your RAM .

Good luck

Answer 10

Go to my computer properties there advanced and then settings.
There u will find virtual memory settings . U can change it to high .