what is the objective of maintaining virtual memory in a personal computer?

Answer 1

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.
A program using all of virtual memory, therefore, would not be able to fit in main memory all at once.

Nevertheless, the computer could execute such a program by copying into main memory those portions of the program needed at any given point during execution.


Source :
http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/itcore/virtualmemory/vmintro.html

regards,
Philip T

Answer 2

Virtual Memory is the Windows operating system keeping track of the memory for you. It basically is a memory overflow area. The overflow will go into a file in the root of your C:\ drive. It is usually hidden and not meant to be modified, edited, etc.

It's best to have Virtual Memory on and let Windows manage it for you... BUT Windows doesn't always give you the best setting and will, therefore, not allow certain programs to run or you will get a really sluggish performance out of your computer.

I don't know the best setting to suggest for you. It varies depending on how much memory you have and what you are using. There are ALOT of utilities out there to help you determine and set-up the best setting for your computer... but, again, they may not always pick the right setting. You might have to determine this for yourself after reading more about it from the internet.

Hope that answers most of the question for you?

Answer 3

Virtual memory is what your computer needs to use if it runs out of real memory (RAM). What it can't hold in RAM it writes to an area of your disk and then reads the data back into RAM when there's room. RAM is lightning fast. Reading from your hard drive is incredibly slow by comparison. If you have enough RAM, you don't need virtual memory. Not that it matters. Even if you have virtual memory enabled, your computer won't use it if it doesn't need to. So, buy a few gigs worth of memory and always have a lightning fast computer.

Answer 4

Virtual memory or virtual memory addressing is a memory management technique, used by computer operating systems, more common in multitasking OSes, wherein non-contiguous memory is presented to a software (aka process) as contiguous memory. This contiguous memory is referred to as the virtual address space.

Answer 5

Enlarging memory cheaply by using hard disk space as vir. mem. because it is not needed to maintain costly true RAM chips beyond a reasonable guestimate.