Vista and FS2004

Hello All:

First post. Hope someone can offer advice as to my new PC and the "Out of Memory" error message.

First off, my PC specs: HP a6250z CTO

AMD Athlon 64 Duo Core 5600+ 2.8ghz
250GB Hitachi HD
4 GB's 667 RAM
Nvidia 8500GT
Creative X-fi Extreme Audio
Vista Home Premium 32 bit (ugh)

I think that should cover the critical hardware. I ordered this PC with tongue in cheek regarding Vista as the OS, but had no choice from HP. Started loading legacy programs from my old XP PRO PC and all went rather well. No hitches. I then loaded my primary game (simulation) which is MS Flight Simulator 2004. No problem, yet!

Loaded in all my FS addon programs which brought the total FS folder to slightly less than 33 GB's. I might mention this exact same configuration of addons and programs ran perfectly under XP PRO. Not a hitch, other than my processor (1.4) and memory (1 GB) were way under powered for what I was feeding it. Slide show much of the time. Hence, an upgrade-new PC.

Fired up Vista and could not even get FS 2004 to LOAD! Got the "Your PC is Out of Memory". WHAT? Increased the paging file to 4096 min/ 120000 max.
Still got the error message.

Now, can anyone explain what is happening to me with Vista? Remember as I previously stated, FS ran flawlessly under XP PRO, less a mild slide show.

This situation really has me baffled, not to mention being slightly upset. Is this Vista in all it's glory? Am considering wiping out Vista and re-installing XP.
4 times the memory, twice the processor speed, 6 times the HD capacity over my old system, and Vista tells me "Your PC is Out of Memory".

Thanks for listening. Hope someone can help.

Chris

 

Greetings miata54,

This is an annoyance that I had to deal with a while back and being an avid FS fan, I was pulling hair out. From digging into MSKB articles: This happens because Vista has an initial VA address space of 2GB regardless of the total physical memory you have. Once applications hit the 2GB threshold, they start page IO operations. If the paging operations time out for whatever reason, you get the OOM error.

What solved the problem for me was to increase my VA address space to 3GB. To increase your VA memory size to 3GB, open a cmd prompt and type the following:

bcdedit /increaseuserva 3072

The above will increase your VA address space from 2GB to 3GB. Reboot your PC and try Flight Simulator again. You will also notice that after your PC logs on, programs will load much faster as now they have more VA space to load into and are less likely to page their memory out to disk.

You may want to look up more info on the "increaseuserva" switch to see what ratios to GPU memory you could apply to balance performance and usability as increasing VA memory space has its cons too...

Good luck...