Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low ?

Hello, I am a novice computer user. The other day when I was using my pc I receive a pop-up in my task bar reading " Windows- virtual memory too low! your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. (I'm not even sure what that means) Thens my hard disk goes ballistic trying to perform the previously mentioned task, leaving all other programs unresponsive. This was a minor inconvience the first couple of times it did this, but now it does it nearly every time I use my pc. What do you suggest is the best thing I can do to correct this ? Thanks in advance.

 

what are you specs? I can't really hel you without at least knowing your RAM and hard drive capacity.

 

My specs are: Dell 4600 series, 512 mb ddr sd-ram@ 333 mhz, 80gb hard drive, Intel chip (not sure which one exactly), 48x cd-rw, 16x dvd-rom. I hope this gives you a little more to work with. Thanks

 

It sounds like maeybe you have somethin running on your pc that is using up to much RAM, windows usually increases the virtual memory size if there is not enbough RAM, watch your processes and see if anythign is using a lot of memory, 512mb is enough but doubling our ram to 1gb could help alot, I just did with my comp, it makes a huge difference in WoW and in windows restart times and image loading times.

 

Ok, I'll look into that. Thanks splitt3r,I appreciate it !

 

Do you have a built-in graphics card?
My friend has a laptop with a 64Mb on board graphics processor, and 256Mb RAM. What happens is the GFX "borrows" memory from the computer, causing a shortfall in the system memory. And splitt3r is right, the difference in performance between 512mb and 1Gb is huge, especially if running Windows XP.