my virtual memory on my computer is low,is that o.k or has anyone got advice? thank you in advance.?

Answer 1

Make more hard drive space, delete some large files or folders you do not need, performance will suffer with low VM

Answer 2

A few questions;

Do you leave your pc on for long periods? If so reboot once in a while to clear stuff from the paging file (Virtual Memory).

Have you run a spyware scan recently? If not, do so now.

Are you using photoshop or similar programs? If so these often cause problems with paging files/ virtual memory. The way to sort this is ideally to have 2 hard drives and have windows on one of them with a 1-2Gb paging file on the other.

Warning - 2Gb paging file on the same hard drive will slow you down vastly.

Virtual memory is reusable and should this message occur frequently even after a reboot then you need to look at increasing it. If you have only seen this once and it doesn't come back after a reboot then don't worry, unless it gets frequent this is normal.

And for the record stay away from download.com it is full of trojans, malware and spyware.

Answer 3

virtual memory is the part of your hard drive that windows uses as if it were ram
the rule of thumb is that your virtual memory is allways 1.5 times the size of your p.c ram,,i,e 256mb ram= 384mb virtual memory
try to not use any programs that need more memory than you have installed,thats why i allways recommend that a good first upgrade should be your memory,its cheap(256mb ram=£25/$50) and is easy to install yourself
once installed you will notice a improvement straight away and probally do what i did,went out and got more memory straight away
so dont worry about the low virtual memory message,windows increases this automatically ,i used to restart the computer and this did the trick
good luck

Answer 4

virtual memory is slightly different to hard drive memory, sounds like too many programs running? shut some down on your taskbar bottom right. more ram may help, how much ram do you have?
click start>settings>control panel>double click system then click hardware the general. how much Ram you have should be at the bottom.

Answer 5

My computer often tells me the same thing - like once I week - I've been treating it as a reminder to clean out my old files and run anti-virus checks/defrag etc. Once I've deleted the access the message goes away (until I collect another weeks worth of cookies etc)
I've been coping like this for a couple of weeks now so am very interested in the answers you get - thanks for such a useful question!

Answer 6

Click on my computer on the desktop, right click drive c or whatever is your HDD. click properties. Then click disk clean up. Your disk will clean itself and the files temporary stored will be deleted. You will get some space. Now open your window explorer and delete the files you hardly used. Beware donot delete any file from windows or program files folder. I hope this will help.

Answer 7

firstly delete unwanted programs by goin t the control panel and removin teh software completely.u can also do away with unwanted start up programs by unmarking them ( u can do so by going to teh run menu in start menu and type in msconfig wr u can see teh progs runnin . be careful to only unmark knwon unwanted progs).excessive movies songs can be written on cds rather rhan placin in teh harddisk .low virtual space can coz teh pc t crash at vital points and later even surfing the net is impossible

Answer 8

Go Start/Run/ and type msconfig - go to the startup tab and see what stuff is running that you don't need.

Other than that - yes, more hard drive space, or run ccleaner (free) to clean up things that are clogging up your system.

Answer 9

Or, instead of messing about, you could allways set your virtual memory settings higher...

This is my artical I wrote on the subject, go to section 3...

In this article I will explain the procedures you can take for a faster, more efficient personal computer.

1. Hard drives - Defragmenting

Your computer can slow down when files become fragmented. This means that the clusters the file is stored in are not physically next to each other on the disk. The read/write heads have to travel further to read the file. By defragmenting, files are rewritten to the disk in contiguous clusters thus speeding up data retrieval.

You can get away with using the built in Windows defrag tool, however I do not recommend this due to its lack of efficiency. I would much greater recommend VoptXP, a defrag tool of which a 30-day trial copy can be downloaded from here - http://www.vopt.com/VoptXPd.htm

Once you have installed your copy of VoptXP, there are only a couple of actions you have to take to get it under-way. Firstly, load-up VoptXP; when loaded, select the drive you wish to defrag (this usually being your c: drive), and select the first icon to the right of the drive selection area; the defrag button. I suggest leaving your computer for a good hour or so. My computer has 3 x 200gb had drives, taking nearly 8 hours to defrag them all. However it is well worth the time. VoptXP will re-organise all of your files on your hard disk into a logical order; you will definitely notice a speed increase.


2. Boot-up - Loading times

Don’t you just hate it when you top of the range computer takes nearly 3 minutes to start up? It may seem like an eternity. This is most likely due to unwanted processes starting (many without you even knowing), causing your system to take longer to boot. The best way to clear up this problem is to use one of Windows’ built in tools. Go to ‘Start’, ‘Run’ and type “msconfig” without the quotes. This will load up a “System Configuration Utility” window. Navigate to the “Startup” tab where you will be able to see all of the system processes that are starting with windows. Now is the task of un-checking all of the processes that you KNOW you do not need. If you are unsure of any of them, then LEAVE them alone.

When you have finished with the Start-up processes you can then click the “apply”, or “ok” button below to save your changes. If you would like to see the speed increase right now, you can select when asked, to restart you computer now.


3. Ram - Do you need a page-file?

Yeah, ram is a great thing, as long as you have enough of it for your system to run on. Which as current technology prices go, many of you have not. Most computer users can run very easily with somewhere in the region of 256-512mb of ram; with top end users acquiring within the region or 1-4gb of ram or more. With this in mind many users find they are forced into using their hard drive as virtual ram (page file). However, the age-old question has been “What size should my page file be?”.

To find out what you current page file is press (Win Key) + (Pause/Break) which will bring up the System Properties dialog box. Navigate to the “Advanced” tab and select the top of the three settings tabs (under performance). Again, in this new window, select the “Advanced” tab. At the bottom of this window you should be able to see your current page file size. Windows automatically generates this to be about 1.5 times your physical ram of your pc. However experts recommend 2.5 times. This can be set yourself by selecting the change button.

If you are one of the higher-end users I spoke of above, there should be no need at all for you to have a page file, this being due to your system having enough ram to cope with operations and not requiring to use a page file.


4. Upgrades – NoNo’s!!

What you shouldn’t do if you plan to upgrade a part of your systems hardware.

Never purchase unbranded hardware, it will never be as good as branded and will not perform as well, also it can cause compatibility issues with your system.

Only ever purchase components if you are absolutely sure it will fit your PC, many people have purchased socket 775 processors for socket 478 slots, which is just a waste of money.

When purchasing a hard drive, make you know whether your system is capable of using SATA (Serial ATA), or just IDE.


A couple more things you could do to speed up your computer include disabling the Indexing Services windows uses for faster file searching. To do this, navigate to “My Computer”, right click on one of your hard drives and select properties. In the general tab (at the bottom), uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching” and click “ok”, when done, you can then move onto any other hard drives and do the same.

Also as well as this you can generally free up space by deleting unwanted applications from your computer by using “Control Panel” – “Add or Remove Programs”.

Thanks, Andrew Cooke.

P.S. If you have any queries then do not hesitate to e-mail me them at XeonTeam AT gmail.com

Answer 10

There is a free program called "CleanUp" that you can run and it will clean up your memory and free up some space for you. It works great for me. I think you can find it at Download.com