virtual memory low

[welshman 2005]

hi i have a baloon pop up now and again that says virtual memory is low, can anyone help.

and secondly my laptop crashes alot of the time due to something called dr watsons postmortem debugger.

can anyone help rectigy the 2 causes

thanks in advance

[ScottyXS]

Ah virtual memory, this is right up my ally!! just finished a course on operating systems this semester, and all to do with paging!!

To increase the amount of HDD set aside for virtual memory, youll need to select Performance and Maintenance in the Control Panel.
Your varying the system settings, so select System.
In the Advanced tab, under Perfromance, select Settings.
Still in the Advanced tab, under the Virtual Memory choice, select Change.
Now this is where knowing something about Paging etc helps

Under Drive [Volume Label], select the drive that contains the paging file that you want to vary.
Under Paging file size for a selected drive, click to Custom size check box. You can then enter the amount of memory you would like to reserve for Virtual memory in here mate, by entering the sizes (min and max), so youd increase the amount.
Youl probably need to restart your system, for the effects to take place.

Hope this helps

[welshman 2005]

Under Drive [Volume Label], select the drive that contains the paging file that you want to vary.
Under Paging file size for a selected drive, click to Custom size check box. You can then enter the amount of memory you would like to reserve for Virtual memory in here mate, by entering the sizes (min and max), so youd increase the amount.
Youl probably need to restart your system, for the effects to take place.

what should i change them to??

this is what i'm getting so far.

drive : c
space available: 14173mb

custom size
initial size(mb) 288
maximum size 576

[ScottyXS]

Originally Posted by welshman 2005

what should i change them to??

this is what i'm getting so far.

drive : c
space available: 14173mb

custom size
initial size(mb) 288
maximum size 576

christ no wonder your havin problems, 288mb!!
The recommended size should be roughly proportional to the size of your physical memory (RAM).
I would opt for about 1.5 times the size of your RAM. so if your running say 1Gb, the size should be set to 1.5Gb

[ScottyXS]

if its by default already that value, you could sneak it up a bit more. however if you do this drastically, this will effect the performance of your system.

[GotaFancy?]

Run some checks on pcpitstop.com (recommend the "Free Full Tests Scan") - this will check a lot of system settings (including memory) and give you step by step instructions on what to change Low virtual memory problems can also be caused by memory leaks in programs you have running - in this case, it doesn't matter how high you set your virtual memory, you will continue to run into problems. Next time you see the balloon, press CTRL ALT DEL to go to windows task manager, goto the processes tab and see what process has the highest "Mem Usage".

[welshman 2005]

seems to be sorted now.

thanks
scotty and gaf