what is Virtual Memory? How can I increase it?

Question

My computer is telling me I am dangerously low on Virtual Memory.Can someone please advise my best solution?

Answer 1

It is reserved space on your hard drive that supplements your RAM. Usually running out of virtual memory means that you are running too many applications at the same time for your system or one of them is attempting to use too much memory.

Increasing virtual memory is one way of compensating for lack of RAM. However, it's optimum should be set at 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your computer. Virtual memory can be increased, but it comes with a risk if you increase it too much as it can eventually lead to hard drive damage.

To increase VM on Windows XP (should be in similar locations for other versions) look in Control Panel: System, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advanced, Virtual Memory.

You can see if your computer can handle more RAM at http://www.crucial.com/index.asp

It's important to note that everything takes RAM. Not only security products (such as active anti-spyware, anti-virus and firewall) eat up memory but your operating system, active browser windows, running applications (such as Word, Gaming, Messenger, Photoshop, etc) and malware all compete for system resources. The presence of Malware (viruses, spyware, etc) will particularly eat up your system resources so you may want to run your resident security products such as antispyware and antivirus applications to ensure that your system is clean.

Answer 2

Virtual memory is an extension of your computer's physical memory (memory chips or RAMs which are installed in the memory slots of your motherboard). In order to be able to run multiple programs at once, the computer looks for areas of RAM that have not been used recently and copy them onto the hard disk into so called page files. This frees up space in the RAM to load the new application.If your physical RAM is low , then when you are running memory intensive programmes such as games or graphics applications...your p/c will "stutter" whilst the system recovers memory to enable smooth running.A lot of programmes can be running in the "background" and gobbling up your resources and these programmes can be closed to free up memory..You don't say how much actual Physical Ram your PC has but if its less than 1 Gig and you run memory hungry programmes you will find "low memory messages" appearing regularly.
A good method of freeing Virtual memory is as follows.....
Double click... System icon in your Control Panel.......
Select.... Advanced tab and click... Settings..... in the Performance section.....Choose the...Advanced...tab here, and then click ...Change....Then you will see the "Virtual Memory " window......Select...Custom size and set the Initial size (MB) and Maximum size (MB) to the same value....The size most people find as a decent level is "three times" your Physical RAM...Therefore..if you have 512 Mb Ram in your slots, set the max and min value to 1536 Mb .
Click the ...Set tab and then the OK and you're done...
If you don't feel comfortable doing this then your other solution is to add more Physical RAM of the correct type for your Motherboard to increase your memory performance

Answer 3

The best solution to virtual memory issues is installing more RAM memory. I would bet that you have a low amount of ram, 256mb or less. 256mb is the absolute minimum I recommend to run XP, 512mb is better, and 1gb or more is best if you do a lot of multitasking or run autocad, publishing and/or video and photo programs. Virtual memory can be increased, but it doesn't help system performance if you have a low amount of RAM. Virtual memory is just that...fake ram memory. It uses the hard drive to swap data when you run low on RAM. This process is much slower than nanosecond RAM memory. By far the best upgrade you can give a computer is more ram. It affects everything...it will boot up faster, shut down faster, run programs faster and multitask much better. That is, if the computer isn't heavily infected with malware, but that's another story!

Answer 4

Virtual Memory is the extended memory or address spaces that the computer uses in order to place things while running processes. In order to increase this you can put in more physical memory or you can allocate more disk space on what is called a paging file. If you right click on My Computer and then choose "properties". From there choose the the "advanced " tab. Once you have chosen that, then you want to click on the "settings" tab located in the "performance" section towards to top and then click on the "advanced" button. Towards the bottom of the page you will see a section called "virtual memory". Click on the change button and then this will allow you to set the paging file to a certain size. Be very careful with this setting as you do not want to set it too high or you will cause performance problems with your system.
Hopefully this helps. If you find that increasing the virtual memory is causing performance problems then it may be time to increase your physical memory (RAM).

Regards,

MBB

Answer 5

Virtual memory is a certain amount of your hard drive that your computer uses in place of RAM. Using virtual memory instead of RAM slows down your PC.
You will want to check into increasing the amount of your physical RAM.
You can increase the size of virtual memory by going into system properties (right click on my computer and select properties), in the advanced tab below the performance heading select the setting button. This will open a new window, go into the advanced tab of this window. The bottom category in this window is virtual memory. Click change. It should be about 1.5 times your physical RAM.

Answer 6

virtual memory is hard drive space that the computer uses for temporary memory, as opposed to RAM. Your control panel->system panel has a tab that control this function. You can manually allocate more virtual memory, if you have the hard drive space. If you don't, you'll have to get some room on your hard drive by deleting something.

virtual memory is WAY slower than RAM, and a good long term solution is to just get more RAM.

Answer 7

Click Start-control panel-system-advanced-performance settings-advanced--set your virtual memory at 2000-4000. This is assuming you have windows XP or Vista. You also need some free space on your C Drive to use for v ram.

Answer 8

go through your files and delete what your not using. Then run disk clean up and then defrag. This will free up some hard space, which in turn will create a little more virtual memory. Or, go out and buy bigger memory strips...

Answer 9

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virtual-memory.htm

Answer 10

Buy ram