slow virtual memory?

now im not sure if this is the right place for this q but my pc runs really slow, when playing games like the sims2 my houses are massive and the pc just struggles to even load them, also when ur using to many internet pages / tabs like photobucket or facebook it goes slow, whats casuing this as it use to run fine? is it virtual memory or what?? :confused

 

Hi Mum,

I'm not really sure what you are asking so here is a little infor on Virtual Mem: VMen is Hard Drive Space used to temporarily store data and stuff that is waiting to be run. It is used heavily when you do not have enough REAL memory. All programs have to be loaded into Real Memory in order to run. The machine is slow be cause HDrive is many times slower that Real Mem. All that swapping can really slow the comp down. Hope this helps a bit.

Good Luck, Jim

 

Sounds like graphics card, what specs on your pc, brand, name, model number? How much RAM installed?

 

For one thing Virtual Memory resides on the hard disk, you will definitely notice lag if you machine has less than 1 GB of ram, as well as if your hard drive is getting old or is heavily fragmented. Biggest thing that helps, take junk out of the start-up. Start>Run... type msconfig

Now if you're not familar with this tool be careful on what you take out, infact only mess with things under startup, stay away from services tab and others, unless you know what you're doing. Under the start-up take out things that dont need to startup such as MySpace IM, or Quick Time, Nero Check, Winamp, AOL, etc, you get the idea.

Getting back to the main point. Graphics card would definitely help.

But adding more memory will reduce the need of the page file (aka virtual memory). The page file is really meant for things stored in RAM (physical memory) that, well windows aint using, but on machines will little memory is becomes a transfer station, a slow one at that.

The transfer rates of your hard drive (virtual memory) is somewhere around 10-20 MB/sec (throughput)

The transfer rates of your memory on the other hand are around 1000-6000 MB/sec

However in some cases even machines with 2 GB of ram will run and load slow because thier hard drive is either getting old or is on it's last leg. As the drives get old they tend to be more erroranous.