I have a problem with my computer that I just don't understand. HELP?

Question

I would be on for an hour or two then this little window from the bottom pops up and says my virtual memory is low and it may cause some things not to go through. It's been going on for about a week or so now. I deleted lots of old games and other junk but that did not work. What else can I do? What is Virtual Memory by the way?

Answer 1

There's no hardware problem in your computer. I hope you are using XP windows version in your PC. Do this structure. Go to my computer and right click then go to properties. you may see some bars on the window. click on 'Advanced' bar. there are three sections. first section is perfomance. under perfomance go settings. then another window will appear. then click on 'Advanced' bar. and you may see another three sections. focus on below section which is named as 'virtual memory'. under virtual memory go to change. there is three sections again click on 'custom size'. then increase 'initial size'. eg:- if maximum size is '1536' increase your initial size up to '1536' . you may also increase the numbers below 1536 also. Then click 'set' and exit from the properties window. i think you got it.

Answer 2

Virtual memory is what allows your computer to run many different programs at the same time. Usually this is done by your computer's RAM, but as the amount of RAM is limited (ex. 32 megabytes) when it gets full, instead of telling you that it cannot open another appication becuase the RAM is full, it copies areas of the RAM that have not been used recently to the hard drive (which is also cheaper by the way) thereby freeing up the RAM and allowing the program to run.

Since the hard drive speed is much slower than RAM, and since the hard drive was not really made to access small pieces of data at one time, if your system relies on virtual memory too much, you will notice a significant performance drop and your computer will be very slow.

The idea is to have enough RAM to cover the applications that you usually run together, so that you may only notice the slight pause when switching between applications. In your situation, your computer is "thrashing," or copying back and forth, memory between the RAM and hard drive.

You may want to manually set your virtual memory limits. To do so:
1. open the "Control Panel" window and double-click on the "System" icon. The system dialog window will open. Click on the "Performance" tab and then click on the "Virtual Memory" button.

2. To do this, open the "Control Panel" window and double-click on the "System" icon. The system dialog window will open. Click on the "Performance" tab and then click on the "Virtual Memory" button.

3. In the "Minimum:" box, enter the smallest amount of hard drive space you wish to use for virtual memory on the hard disk specified. The amounts are in megabytes. For the "C:" drive, the minimum should be 2 megabytes. The "Maximum:" figure can be anything you like, but one possible upper limit is twice physical RAM space. Windows default is normally 12 megabytes above the amount of physical RAM in your computer. To put the new settings into effect, close the dialog box and restart your computer.

Make sure you specify enough hard drive space for your virtual memory. If you allocate too little, you will get "Out of Memory" errors. If you have to keep increasing the size of the virtual memory, it's very possible that your system will become very slow becuase it needs to access the hard drive all the time. In that case, you should purchase more RAM to keep the ratio between RAM and virtual memory about 2:1. Some applications can have lots of virtual memory space but not use it very much. In that case, having large paging files is a good idea.

If you make the minimum and maximum sizes of the virtual memory file identical, it can help boost your virtual memory. This forces the operating system to use up the use up the space of the paging file when you start the machine. This way the paging file can't get any bigger when programs are running, which improves performance.

Also, if your system has many different 'physical' (tangible) hard drives, by making smaller pagefiles on each drive, you can divide the effort among them. By doing so, your system will improve dramatically.

Good Luck!

Answer 3

Virtual Memory is an imaginary memory area supported by some operating systems (for example, Windows but not DOS) in conjunction with the hardware. You can think of virtual memory as an alternate set of memory addresses. Programs use these virtual addresses rather than real addresses to store instructions and data. When the program is actually executed, the virtual addresses are converted into real memory addresses.

The purpose of virtual memory is to enlarge the address space, the set of addresses a program can utilize. For example, virtual memory might contain twice as many addresses as main memory.

Now, to solve your problem then increase the amount of virtual memory your system has. To do this, follow these instructions.

1. Right click on My Computer, then click on Properties
2. Click on the Advance tab
3. Click on Settings under Performance
4. Click on Advance tab
5. On the bottom where it says Virtual Memory, click Change.
6. Increase to your desire.

Note: Typically, the system allocates an exact amount of your physical RAM plus a half... For example, if your PC has 512 MB of memory, your system would assign 768 MB of Virtual Memory.

Click below for an see an article on how virtual memory works
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virtual-memory.htm

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Virtual memory is space on the hard drive allocated to be used as additional storage for system memory, AKA 'RAM'. It does not write or read as fast however.

The warning error means that you are using almost all of your systems memory and virtual memory. First I would recommend clearing out those programs that are loading on start up and are resident in memory first. These may be programs that load legitimately on start up or viruses/spy-ware. Eliminate these first of course. This way you will use less memory. If this is still not enough you will need to allocate more space for virtual memory or upgrade the ram on your system.

Answer 5

Virtual Memory will determine how fast (aka smoothly) your computer will run. If you're low on VM, things will go slower. You can see what is taking up all the memory/processor speed by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete and clicking on the Processes tab. If something is taking up an exorbitant amount of "Mem Usage", try to kill the process.

Or... just buy more Memory.

Answer 6

you have two solutions, one cheap and the other is the expensive and most reliable.

1. Cheap one
right click on your computer, then select properties, then go to Advanced tab, and from thier select virual memory, just allocate more memory (IE: let Virtual memory managed manually not by windows) and give 1GB on your primary drive and 1 GB on any other driver IE: on D:\

2. Expensive one:

just purchase new memory DDR

Answer 7

Right click on My Computer>Properties>Advance tab>Click on Settings under Performance>Click on Advance tab>On the bottom where it says Virtual Memory click Change.

Answer 8

That's a good answer by Digital Genius, but, one thing I would add, go and increase the size of your virtual memory, and that's something that DG is going to have to tell you to do, cause I don't remember..

Answer 9

You need to give more details, what operating system are you using?
If you're using windows 2000
1 -Open System in Control Panel.
2- On the Advanced tab, click Performance Options, and under Virtual memory, click Change. In the Drive list, click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change. Under Paging file size for selected drive, type a new paging file size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

If you're using XP
1- Open System in Control Panel.
2- On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
3- On the Advanced tab, under Virtual memory, click Change.
4- Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.
Under Paging file size for selected drive, click Custom size, and type a new paging file size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

Now if you decrease the size you must restart if you increase then you're good to go.
Good luck!

Answer 10

click on start
run
type in msconfig

on the LAST tab to the right.
its called startup
click the tab.
look at all the check marks
those are programs starting up when your pc first boots
take out EVERY check mark.
if you need to run a program you're going to click it anyhow.
THEN it will run. not before.

that will free up a lot of memory.

option 2
install more memory.